BANCROFT 
LIBRARY 

THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

Gift  of 
Joseph  M.  Bransten 


o 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 


A  Woman  of  Genius 

BY 

MARY  AUSTIN 


Author  of  "The  Land  of  Little  Rain' 

"The  Arrowmaker,"    "Isidro," 

"Christ  in  Italy,"  etc.,  etc. 


BOSTON  AND   NEW   YORK 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

Cbe  Rtoer*i&e  press  Cambrid0e 
1917 


Pi  3  7 


COPYRIGHT,  1912,  BY  DOUBLED  AY,  PAGE  ft  CO. 
COPYRIGHT,  1917,  BY  MARY  AUSTIN 

ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 


TO 

LOU    HENRY    HOOVER 
AND    SOME    PLEASANT    MEMORIES 

OF 

THE    RED    HOUSE    IN    HORNTON 
STREET 


V  H  (\  H  U  I J   T"i  0  H  *J  11 1\  G:"3  H  T 


BOOK  I 


CHAPTER  I 

IT  is  strange  that  I  can  never  think  of  writing  any 
account  of  my  life  without  thinking  of  Pauline  Mills 
and  wondering  what  she  will  say  of  it.  Pauline  is 
rather  given  to  reading  the  autobiographies  of  dis 
tinguished  people  —  unless  she  has  left  off  since  I 
disappointed  her  —  and  finding  in  them  new  per 
suasions  of  the  fundamental  Tightness  of  her  scheme 
of  things.  I  recall  very  well,  how,  when  I  was  having 
the  bad  time  of  my  life  there  in  Chicago,  she  would 
abound  in  consoling  instances  from  one  then  appear 
ing  in  the  monthly  magazines;  skidding  over  the 
obvious  derivation  of  the  biographist's  son  from  the 
Lord  Knows  Who,  except  that  it  wasn't  from  the 
man  to  whom  she  was  legally  married,  to  fix  on  the 
foolish  detail  of  the  child's  tempers  and  woolly  lambs 
as  the  advertisement  of  that  true  womanliness  which 
Pauline  loves  to  pluck  from  every  feminine  bush. 

There  was  also  a  great  deal  in  that  story  about  a 
certain  other  celebrity,  for  her  relations  to  whom  the 
writer  was  blackballed  in  a  club  of  which  I  afterward 
became  a  member,  and  I  think  it  was  the  things 
Pauline  said  about  one  of  the  rewards  of  genius  being 
the  privilege  of  association  with  such  transcendent 
personalities  on  a  footing  which  permitted  one  to  call 

8 


4  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

them  by  their  first  names  in  one's  reminiscences, 
that  gave  me  the  notion  of  writing  this  book.  It 
has  struck  me  as  humorous  to  a  degree,  that,  in  this 
sort  of  writing,  the  really  important  things  are  usu 
ally  left  out. 

I  thought  then  of  writing  the  life  of  an  accom 
plished  woman,  not  so  much  of  the  accomplishment 
as  of  the  woman;  and  I  have  never  been  able  to  make 
a  start  at  it  without  thinking  of  Pauline  Mills  and 
that  curious  social  warp  which  obligates  us  most  to 
impeach  the  validity  of  a  woman's  opinion  at  the 
points  where  it  is  most  supported  by  experience. 
From  the  earliest  I  have  been  rendered  highly  suspi 
cious  of  the  social  estimate  of  women,  by  the  general 
social  conspiracy  against  her  telling  the  truth  about 
herself.  But,  in  fact,  I  do  not  think  Mrs.  Mills  will 
read  my  book.  Henry  will  read  it  first  at  his  office 
and  tell  her  that  he'd  rather  she  shouldn't,  for  Henry 
has  been  so  successfully  Paulined  that  it  is  quite 
sufficient  for  any  statement  of  life  to  lie  outside 
his  wife's  accepted  bias,  to  stamp  it  with  insidious 
impropriety.  There  is  at  times  something  almost 
heroic  in  the  resolution  with  which  women  like  Pau 
line  Mills  defend  themselves  from  whatever  might 
shift  the  centres  of  their  complacency. 

But  even  without  Pauline,  it  interests  me  greatly  to 
undertake  this  book,  of  which  I  have  said  in  the  title 
as  much  as  a  phrase  may  of  the  scope  of  the  under 
taking,  for  if  I  know  anything  of  genius  it  is  wholly 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  5 

extraneous,  derived,  impersonal,  flowing  through  and 
by.  I  cannot  tell  you  what  it  is,  but  I  hope  to  show 
you  a  little  of  how  I  was  seized  of  it,  shaped;  what 
resistances  opposed  to  it;  what  surrenders.  I  mean 
to  put  as  plainly  as  possible  how  I  felt  it  fumbling  at 
my  earlier  life  like  the  sea  at  the  foot  of  a  tidal  wall, 
and  by  what  rifts  in  the  structure  of  living,  its  inun 
dation  rose  upon  me;  by  what  practices  and  passions 
I  was  enlarged  to  it,  and  by  what  well  meaning  of  my 
friends  I  was  cramped  and  hardened.  But  of  its 
ultimate  operation  once  it  had  worked  up  through 
my  stiff  clay,  of  triumphs,  profits,  all  the  intricacies 
of  technique,  gossip  of  rehearsals,  you  shall  hear  next 
to  nothing.  This  is  the  story  of  the  struggle  be 
tween  a  Genius  for  Tragic  Acting  and  the  daughter  of 
a  County  Clerk,  with  the  social  ideal  of  Taylorville, 
Ohianna,  for  the  villain.  It  is  a  drama  in  which 
none  of  the  characters  played  the  parts  they  were 
cast  for,  and  invariably  spoke  from  the  wrong  cues, 
which  nevertheless  proceeded  to  a  successful  de 
nouement.  But  if  you  are  looking  for  anything 
ordinarily  called  plot,  you  will  be  disappointed. 
Plot  is  distinctly  the  province  of  fiction,  though  I've 
a  notion  there  is  a  sort  of  order  in  my  story,  if  one 
could  look  at  it  from  the  vantage  of  the  gods,  but  I 
have  never  rightly  made  it  out.  What  I  mean  to  go 
about  is  the  exploitation  of  the  personal  phases  of 
genius,  of  which  when  it  refers  to  myself  you  must 
not  understand  me  to  speak  as  of  a  peculiar  merit, 


6  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

like  the  faculty  for  presiding  at  a  woman's  club  or 
baking  sixteen  pies  of  a  morning,  which  distinguished 
one  Taylorvillian  from  another;  rather  as  a  seizure, 
a  possession  which  overtook  me  unaware,  like  one  of 
those  insidious  Oriental  disorders  which  you  may 
never  die  of,  but  can  never  be  cured.  You  shall  hear 
how  I  did  successfully  stave  it  off  in  my  youth  for  the 
sake  of  a  Working  Tailor  and  Men's  Outfitter,  and 
was  nearly  intimidated  out  of  it  by  the  wife  of  a 
Chicago  attorney  who  had  something  to  do  with 
stocks;  how  I  was  often  very  tired  of  it,  and  many 
times,  especially  hi  the  earlier  periods  when  I  was 
trying  to  effect  a  compromise  between  it  and  the 
afore-mentioned  Taylorvillian  predilections,  I  should 
have  been  happiest  to  have  been  quit  of  it  altogether. 
I  shall  try  to  have  you  understand  that  I  have  not 
undertaken  to  restate  those  phases  of  autobiography 
which  are  commonly  suppressed,  because  of  an  ex 
ception  to  what  the  public  has  finally  and  at  large 
concurred  in,  that  it  does  not  particularly  matter 
what  happens  to  the  vessel  of  personality,  so  long  as 
the  essential  fluid  gets  through;  but  from  having 
gone  so  much  farther  to  discover  that  it  matters  not 
a  little  to  Genius  to  be  so  scamped  and  retarded.  I 
have  arrived  at  seeing  the  uncritical  acceptance  of 
poverty  and  heartbreak  as  essential  accompaniments 
of  Gift,  very  much  of  a  piece  with  the  proneness  of 
Christians  to  regard  the  early  martyrdoms  as  con 
comitants  of  faith,  when  every  thinking  person 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  7 

knows  they  arose  in  the  cruelty  and  stupidity  of  the 
bystanders.  Hardly  any  one  seems  to  have  re 
called  in  this  connection,  that  the  initial  Christian 
experience  is  a  baptism  of  Joy,  and  it  was  only  in  the 
business  of  communicating  it  that  it  became  bloody 
and  tormenting.  If  you  will  go  a  little  farther  with 
me,  you  shall  be  made  to  see  the  miseries  of  genius, 
perhaps  also  the  bulk  of  wretchedness  everywhere, 
not  so  much  the  rod  of  inexplicable  chastisement, 
as  the  reaction  of  a  purblind  social  complacency. 

I  shall  take  you  at  the  sincerest  in  admitting  the 
function  of  Art  to  be  its  re-kneading  of  the  bread  of 
life  until  it  nourishes  us  toward  greater  achievement, 
as  a  basis  for  proving  that  much  that  you  may  be 
thinking  about  its  processes  is  wrong,  and  most  that 
you  may  have  done  for  its  support  is  beside  the  mark. 
If  I  have  had  any  compunction  about  writing  this 
book,  it  has  been  the  fear  that  in  the  relation  of  in 
cidents  difficult  and  sordid,  you  might  still  miss  the 
point  of  your  being  largely  to  blame  for  them.  And 
even  if  you  escape  the  banality  of  believing  that  my 
having  lived  for  a  week  in  Chicago  on  85  cents  was 
in  any  way  important  to  my  artistic  development, 
and  go  so  far  as  to  apprehend  it  as  it  actually  was,  a 
foolish  and  unnecessary  interference  with  my  business 
of  serving  you  anew  with  entertainment,  you  must 
go  a  little  farther  honestly  to  accept  it,  even  when  it 
came  —  this  revitalizing  fluid  of  which  I  was  for  the 
moment  the  vase,  the  cup  —  in  circumstances  which 


8  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

in  the  rule  you  live  by,  appear,  when  not  actually 
reprehensible,  at  least  ridiculous. 

Looking  back  over  a  series  of  struggles  that  have 
left  me  in  a  frame  when  no  man  under  forty 
interests  me  very  much,  still  within  the  possibility  of 
personal  romance,  and  at  an  age  when  most  women 
have  the  affectional  value  of  a  keepsake  only,  the 
arbiter  and  leader  of  my  world,  I  seem  to  see  my  life 
not  much  else  but  a  breach  in  the  social  fabric,  sedu 
lously  bricked  up  from  within  and  battered  from 
without,  through  which  at  last  pours  light  and  the 
fluid  soul  of  Life.  Something  of  all  this  I  shall  try 
to  make  plain  to  you,  and  incidentally  how  in  the 
process  I  have  perceived  dimly  this  huge  coil  of  so 
cial  adjustment  as  a  struggle  against  the  invasive 
forces  of  blessedness,  the  smother  of  sheep  in  the 
lanes  stupidly  to  escape  the  fair  pastures  toward 
which  a  large  Friendliness  herds  them.  If  you  go 
as  far  as  this  with  me,  you  shall  avoid,  who  knows, 
what  indirection,  and  that  not  altogether  without 
entertainment. 


CHAPTER  II 

OF  TAYLORVILLE,  where  I  grew  up  and  was  married, 
the  most  distinguishing  thing  was  that  there  was 
nothing  to  distinguish  it  from  a  hundred  towns  in 
Ohianna.  To  begin  with,  it  was  laid  out  about  a 
square,  and  had  two  streets  at  right  angles  known  as 
Main  and  Broad.  Broad  Street,  I  remember,  ran  east 
and  west  between  the  high  school  and  the  railway 
station,  and  Main  Street  had  the  Catholic  cemetery 
on  the  south,  and  the  tool  and  hoe  works  on  the  north 
to  mark — there  was  no  other  visible  distinction — the 
points  at  which  it  became  country  road.  There  were 
numerous  cross  streets,  east  and  west,  called  after 
the  Governors,  or  perhaps  it  was  the  Presidents,  and 
north  and  south,  set  forth  on  official  maps  as  avenues, 
taking  their  names  from  the  trees  with  which  they 
were  falsely  declared  to  be  planted,  though  I  do  not 
recall  that  they  were  ever  spoken  of  by  these  names 
except  by  the  leading  county  paper  which  had  its 
office  in  one  corner  of  the  square  over  the  Coopera 
tive  store,  was  Republican  in  politics,  and  stood  for 
Progress. 

The  square  was  planted  with  maples;  a  hitching 
rack  ran  quite  around  it  and  was,  in  the  number  and 
character  of  the  vehicles  attached  to  it,  a  sort  of 

9 


10  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

public  calendar  for  the  days  of  the  week  and  the 
seasons.  On  court  days  and  elections,  I  remember, 
they  quite  filled  the  rack  and  overflowed  to  the  tie- 
posts  in  front  of  the  courthouse,  which  stood  on  its 
own  ground  a  little  off  from  the  square,  balanced  on 
the  opposite  side  by  the  Methodist  Church.  It  was 
a  perfect  index  to  the  country  neighbourhoods  that 
spread  east  send  north  to  the  flat,  black  corn  lands, 
west  to  the  marl  and  clay  of  the  river  district,  and 
south  to  the  tall-weeded,  oozy  Bottoms.  Teams 
from  the  Bottoms,  I  believe,  always  had  cockleburs 
in  their  tails;  and  spanking  dapple  grays  drove  in 
with  shining  top-buggies  from  the  stock  farms  whose 
flacking  windmills  on  the  straight  horizons  of  the 
north,  struck  on  my  childish  fancy  as  some  sort  of 
mechanical  scarecrow  to  frighten  away  the  homey 
charms  of  the  wooded  hills.  I  recall  this  sort  of  de 
tail  as  the  only  thing  in  my  native  town  that  affected 
my  imagination.  When  I  saw  the  flakes  of  black 
loam  dropping  from  the  tires,  or  the  yellow  clay  of 
the  river  district  caked  solidly  about  the  racked  hubs, 
I  was  stirred  by  the  allurement  of  travel  and  adven 
ture,  the  movement  of  human  enterprise  on  the 
fourwent  ways  of  the  world. 

From  my  always  seeming  to  see  them  so  bemired 
with  their  recent  passages,  I  gather  that  my  obser 
vations  must  have  been  made  chiefly  in  winter  on 
my  way  to  school.  From  other  memories  of  Taylor- 
ville  arched  in  by  the  full-leaved  elms  and  maples, 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  11 

smelling  of  dust  and  syringas,  and  never  quite  sepa 
rable  from  a  suspicion  of  boredom,  I  judge  my 
summer  acquaintance  with  its  streets  to  have  been 
chiefly  by  way  of  going  to  church,  for,  until  the  win 
ter  I  was  eleven  years  old,  Taylorville,  the  world  in 
fact,  meant  Hadley's  pasture. 

It  lay  back  of  that  part  of  the  town  where  our 
house  was,  contiguous  to  a  common  of  abandoned 
orchard  and  cow  lot,  and  if  it  lacked  anything  of 
adventurous  occasion  and  delight,  we,  Forrie  and  Effie 
and  I,  the  McGee  children,  and  the  little  Ailing- 
hams,  did  not  know  it.  There  was  a  sort  of  con 
vention  of  childhood  that  we  should  never  go  straight 
to  it  by  the  proper  path,  but  it  must  always  be  taken 
by  assault  or  stealth:  over  the  woodhouse  and  then 
along  the  top  of  the  orchard  fence  as  far  as  you  could 
manage  without  falling  off,  and  then  tagging  the 
orchard  trees;  I  remember  there  were  times  when  we 
felt  obliged  to  climb  up  every  tree  in  our  way  and 
down  on  the  other  side,  and  so  to  the  stump  lot 
where  the  earliest  violets  were  to  be  found  —  how 
blue  it  would  be  with  them  in  April  about  the  fairy 
ring  of  some  decaying  trunk!  —  and  beyond  the 
stump  lot,  the  alder  brook  and  the  Stone-pit  pond 
where  we  caught  a  pike  once,  come  up  from  the  river 
to  spawn.  Up  from  the  brook  ranged  a  wood  over 
the  shallow  hills,  farther  and  darker  than  we  dared, 
and  along  its  banks  was  every  variety  of  pleasant 
ness.  There  was  always  something  to  be  done  there, 


12  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

springs  to  be  scooped  out,  rills  to  be  dammed;  always 
something  to  eat,  sassafras  root,  minnows  taken  by 
hand  and  half  cooked  on  surreptitious  fires,  red  haws 
and  hazelnuts;  always  some  place  to  be  visited  with 
freshness  and  discovery,  dark  umbrageous  corners  to 
provide  that  dreaded  and  delighted  panic  of  the  wild. 

But  perhaps  the  best  service  the  pasture  did  us 
was  as  a  theatre  for  the  dramatization  of  the  bour 
geoning  social  instinct.  We  played  at  church  and 
school  in  it,  at  scalping  and  Robinson  Crusoe  and 
the  Three  Bears.  We  went  farther  and  played  at 
High  Priests  and  Oracles  and  Sacrifice  —  and  what 
were  we  at  Taylorville  to  know  of  such  things? 

If  this  were  to  be  as  full  an  account  of  my  Art  as 
it  is  of  myself,  I  should  have  to  stop  here  and  try  to 
have  you  understand  how  at  this  time  I  was  all  awash 
in  the  fluid  stuff  of  it,  buoyed  and  possessed  by  un- 
knowledgable  splendours,  heroisms,  tendernesses,  a 
shifty  glittering  flood.  I  am  always  checked  in  my 
attempt  to  render  this  submerged  childhood  of  mine 
by  the  recollection  of  my  mother  in  the  midst  of  the 
annoyance  which  any  reference  to  it  always  caused 
her,  trying  judicially  to  account  for  it  on  the  basis 
of  my  having  read  too  much,  with  the  lurking  con 
viction  at  the  bottom  of  all  comment  that  a  few  more 
spankings  might  have  effectually  counteracted  it. 
But  though  I  read  more  than  the  other  children, 
there  was  never  very  much  to  read  in  Taylorville  at 
any  time,  and  no  amount  of  reading  could  have  put 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  IS 

into  my  mind  what  I  found  there  —  the  sustaining 
fairy  wonder  of  the  world. 

I  was  not,  I  think,  different  in  kind  from  the  other 
children,  except  as  being  more  consistently  immersed 
in  it  and  never  quite  dispossessed.  I  have  lost  and 
rediscovered  the  way  to  it  some  several  times;  have 
indeed,  had  to  defend  its  approaches  with  violence 
and  skill:  this  whole  business  of  the  biography  has 
no  other  point,  in  fact,  than  to  show  you  how  far  my 
human  behaviour  has  been  timed  to  keep  what  I 
believe  most  people  part  with  no  more  distressfully 
than  with  their  milk  teeth.  Effie,  I  know,  has  no 
recollection  of  this  period  other  than  that  there  was 
a  time  when  the  earth  was  hung  with  vestiges  of 
splendour,  and  if  my  brother  has  kept  anything  of 
his  original  inheritance,  he  would  sooner  admit  to  a 
left  over  appetite  for  jujubes  and  liquorice;  for  Fores 
ter  is  fully  of  the  common  opinion  that  the  fevers, 
flights  and  drops  of  temperament  are  the  mere  in 
firmity  of  Gift.  There  was  a  time,  before  I  left  off 
talking  to  Forester  at  all  about  my  work,  when  he 
visibly  permitted  his  pity  to  assuage  his  disgust  at 
the  persistence  of  so  patent  a  silliness  in  me,  and  still 
earlier,  before  I  owned  three  motor  cars,  an  estate  in 
Florida  and  a  house  on  the  Hudson,  there  were  not 
wanting  intimations  of  its  voluntary  assumption  as 
a  pose;  pose  in  Forester's  vocabulary  standing  for 
any  frame  of  behaviour  to  which  he  is  not  naturally 
addicted.  But  there  it  was,  the  flux  of  experience 


14  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

rising  to  the  surface  of  our  plays,  the  reservoir  from 
which  later,  without  having  personally  contemplated 
such  an  act,  I  drew  the  authority  for  how  Lady  Mac 
beth  must  have  felt,  about  to  do  a  murder,  from 
which  if  I  had  had  a  taste  for  it,  I  might  have  drawn 
with  like  assurance  the  necessity  of  the  square  of  the 
hypothenuse  to  equal  the  squares  of  the  other  two 
sides. 

It  is  curious  that,  though  I  cannot  remember  how 
my  father  looked  nor  who  taught  me  long  division, 
I  recall  perfectly  how  the  reddening  blackberry 
leaves  lay  under  the  hoar  frost  in  Hadley's  pasture, 
and  the  dew  between  the  pale  gold  wires  of  the  grass 
on  summer  mornings,  and  the  very  words  and  rites 
by  which  we  paid  observance  to  Snockerty.  I  am 
not  sure  whether  Ellen  McGee  or  I  invented  him, 
but  first  and  last  he  got  us  into  as  much  trouble  as 
though  we  had  not  always  distinctly  recognized  him 
for  an  invention.  The  McGees  lived  quite  around 
the  corner  of  the  pasture  from  us,  and,  as  far  as  my 
memory  serves,  the  whole  seven  of  them  had  noth 
ing  to  do  but  lie  in  wait  for  any  appearance  of  ours 
in  the  stump  lot;  though  in  respect  to  their  father 
being  a  section  boss,  and  the  family  Catholic,  we 
were  not  supposed,  when  we  put  on  our  good  clothes 
and  went  out  of  the  front  gate,  to  meet  them  socially. 
I  think  there  must  have  been  also  some  parental 
restriction  on  our  intercourse  of  play,  for  they  never 
came  to  our  house  nor  we  to  theirs;  the  little  Ailing- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  15 

hams,  in  fact,  never  would  play  with  them.  They 
came  to  play  with  us  and  only  included  the  McGees 
on  the  implication  of  their  being  our  guests.  If  at 
any  time  we  three  Lattimores  were  called  away, 
Pauline,  who  was  the  eldest,  would  forthwith  marshal 
her  young  tribe  in  exactly  the  same  manner  in  which 
she  afterward  held  Henry  Mills  in  the  paths  of  rec 
titude,  and  march  them  straight  out  of  the  big  gate 
to  their  home.  I  remember  how  I  used  perfectly 
to  hate  the  expression  of  the  little  Allinghams  on 
these  occasions  and  sympathize  with  the  not  always 
successfully  repressed  jeers  of  the  McGees.  Mrs. 
Allingham  was  the  sort  of  woman  who  makes  a  point 
of  having  the  full  confidence  of  her  children  —  de 
testable  practice  —  and  I  have  always  suspected, 
in  spite  of  the  friendliness  of  the  families,  that  the 
little  Allinghams  used  to  make  a  sort  of  moral  in 
stance  of  us  whenever  they  fell  into  discredit  with 
their  parents.  At  any  rate  the  report  of  our  do 
ings  in  Hadley's  pasture  as  they  worked  around 
through  her  to  our  mother,  would  lead  to  episodes 
of  marked  coolness,  in  which  we  held  ourselves  each 
loftily  aloof  from  the  other,  until  incontinently  the 
spirit  of  play  swirled  us  together  again  in  a  joyous 
democracy. 

At  the  time  when  the  Snockerty  obsession  overtook 
us,  Ellen  McGee  was  the  only  real  rival  I  had  for  the 
leadership  of  the  pasture;  if  she  had  not  had,  along 
with  all  her  Irish  quickness,  a  touch  of  Irish  syco- 


16  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

phancy,  I  should  have  lost  all  my  ascendency  after 
the  advent  of  Snockerty.  I  feel  sure  now  that  Ellen 
must  have  invented  him;  she  was  most  enviably 
furnished  in  all  the  signs  of  lucky  and  unlucky  and 
what  it  meant  if  you  put  your  stocking  on  wrong  side 
out  in  the  morning,  with  charms  to  say  for  warts, 
and  scraps  of  Old  World  song  that  had  all  the  force 
of  incantations.  Her  fairy  tales  too  had  a  more  con 
vincing  sound,  for  she  got  them  from  her  father,  who 
had  always  known  somebody  who  knew  the  human 
participators.  It  was  commonly  insisted  by  Mrs. 
Allingham  that  the  McGee  children  would  never 
come  to  anything,  and  I  believe,  in  fact,  they  never 
did,  but  they  supplied  an  element  of  healthful  vul 
garity  in  our  lives  that,  remembering  Alfred  Ailing- 
ham's  adolescent  priggishness,  I  am  inclined  to  think 
was  very  good  for  us. 

If  I  have  said  nothing  of  my  parents  until  now,  it  is 
because  the  part  they  played  in  our  lives  for  the  first 
ten  years  was,  from  our  point  of  view,  negligible. 
Parents  were  a  sort  of  natural  appenage  of  children, 
against  whose  solidarity  our  performance  had  room 
and  opportunity.  They  kept  the  house  together; 
they  staved  off  fear  —  no  one,  for  instance,  would 
think  of  sleeping  in  a  place  where  there  were  no  par 
ents  —  they  bulked  large  between  us  and  the  un 
known.  There  was  a  general  notion  of  our  elders 
toward  rubbing  it  into  us  that  we  ought  to  be  ex 
cessively  grateful  to  them  for  not  having  turned  us 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  17 

.% 

adrift,  sans  food  and  housing,  but  I  do  not  think  we 
took  it  seriously. 

Parents  existed  for  the  purpose  of  rendering  the 
world  livable  for  children,  and  on  the  whole  their 
disposition  was  friendly,  except  in  cases  like  Mrs. 
Allingham,  who  contrived  always  to  give  you  a  guilty 
sense  of  having  forgot  to  wipe  your  feet  or  tramped 
on  the  flower  borders.  I  do  not  think  we  had  a  more 
active  belief  in  our  parents'  profession  of  absorp 
tion  in  our  interests  than  in  my  father's  pretence 
to  be  desperately  wounded  by  Forester's  popgun,  or 
scared  out  of  his  wits  when  Effie  jumped  at  him  from 
behind  the  syringa  bush.  It  was  admittedly  nice  of 
them  and  it  kept  the  game  going,  but  there  were  also 
times  when  they  did  not  manage  it  so  successfully 
as  we  could  have  wished.  I  think  that  we  never 
questioned  their  right  to  punish  us  for  disobedience, 
perhaps  because  there  is,  after  all,  something  intrin 
sically  sound  about  the  right  of  might,  though  we 
sometimes  questioned  the  occasion,  as  when  we  had 
been  told  we  might  play  in  the  pasture  for  an  hour,  of 
the  passage  of  which  we  knew  as  much  as  wild  pigeons. 
There  was  always,  to  me  at  least,  an  inexplicable- 
ness  about  such  reprisals  that  mitigated  against  their 
moral  issue.  There  was  one  point,  however,  upon 
which  we  all  three  opposed  an  unalterable  front;  we 
would  not  kiss  and  make  up  after  our  private  squab 
bles.  We  fought,  or  combined  against  neighbouring 
tribes,  or  divided  our  benefits  with  an  even  handed- 


18  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

ness  that  obtains  nowhere  as  among  children,  but 
we  would  not  be  tricked  into  a  status  which  it  might 
be  inconvenient  to  maintain.  I  am  sure,  though, 
that  Mrs.  Allingham  used  rather  to  put  it  over  my 
mother  for  her  inability  to  make  little  prigs  of  us. 

"Mothers,"  she  would  say  on  the  rare  occasions 
when  she  came  to  call  in  the  beaded  dolman  and 
black  kid  gloves  which  other  Taylorvillians  wore  only 
on  Sunday,  "MOTHERS,"  with  the  effect  of  mak 
ing  it  all  capitals,  "have  an  inestimable  privilege  in 
shaping  their  children's  characters."  This  was  when 
we  had  had  our  faces  surreptitiously  washed  and 
been  brought  in  for  ceremonial  inspection;  and  a 
little  later  she  would  add,  with  the  air  of  having 
tactfully  conveyed  advice  under  the  guise  of  infor 
mation,  "I  always  insist"  —  here  Forester  would 
kick  me  furtively  —  "insist  on  having  the  full  con 
fidence  of  mine,"  at  which  point  my  mother  would 
make  excuses  to  get  me  out  of  the  room  before  I,  who 
never  could  learn  that  people  are  not  always  of  the 
mind  they  think  they  are,  made  embarrassing  dis 
closures. 

Up  to  this  time  my  mother  figures  chiefly  as  a 
woman  who  tied  up  our  hurts  and  overruled  my 
father  when  he  tried  to  beg  us  off  from  going  to 
church.  I  suppose  it  was  the  baby  always  in  arms 
or  expected  that  kept  us  from  romping  all  over  her 
as  we  did  with  my  father;  and  much  of  her  profession 
of  interest  in  us,  which  came  usually  at  the  end  of 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  19 

admonitory  occasions,  had  the  cold  futility  of  the 
family  prayers  that  my  mother  tried  to  make  appear 
part  of  the  habitual  order  when  Cousin  Judd  came  to 
stay  with  us. 

I  do  not  know  whether  he  suspected  the  hollowness 
of  our  morning  worship,  but  I  am  sure  I  was  never 
in  the  least  imposed  upon  by  the  high  moral  attitude 
from  which  my  mother  attempted  to  deal  with  my 
misbehaviours.  She  used  to  conduct  these  inter 
views  on  the  prescription  of  certain  books  by  the 
reading  of  which  I  was  afterward  corrupted,  on  a 
basis  of  shocked  solemnity  that,  as  she  was  not  with 
out  a  sense  of  humour,  often  broke  down  under  my 
raw  disbelief.  Forester,  always  amenable  to  sug 
gestion,  was  sometimes  reduced  to  writhing  contri 
tion  by  these  inquisitorial  attempts,  but  I  came  away 
from  them  oftenest  not  a  little  embarrassed  by  her 
inability  to  bring  anything  to  pass  by  them. 

I  do  not  think  our  detachment  was  greater  than  is 
common  with  young  children  in  families  where  they 
are  pushed  out  of  their  privilege  of  cuddling  as  fast 
as  they  were  in  ours.  There  was  thirteen  months  be 
tween  Forester  and  me,  another  brother,  early  dead, 
before  Effie,  and  two  that  came  after.  The  children 
who  died  were  always  sickly;  I  think  it  probable  in 
the  country  phrase,  so  appalling  in  its  easy  accept 
ance,  my  mother  had  "never  seen  a  well  day";  and 
what  was  meant  to  be  the  joy  of  loving  was  utterly 
swamped  for  her  in  its  accompanying  dread.  I 


20  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

seem  to  have  been  born  into  the  knowledge  that  the 
breast,  the  lap,  and  the  brooding  tenderness  were  the 
sole  prerogative  of  babies;  it  was  imperative  to  your 
larger  estate  not  to  exhibit  the  weakness  of  wanting 
them.  There  comes  back  to  me  in  this  connection 
an  evening  with  us  three,  Forester,  Effie  and  I, 
squeezed  on  to  the  lowest  step  of  the  stairs  for  com 
pany,  my  mother  in  the  dusk,  rocking  and  singing 
one  of  those  wildly  sweet  and  tragic  melodies  that 
the  men  brought  back  out  of  the  South  as  seeds  are 
carried  in  a  sheep's  coat.  To  this  day  I  cannot  hear 
it  without  a  certain  swelling  to  let  in  the  smell  of  the 
summer  dusk  and  the  flitter  of  the  bats  outside  and 
the  quaver  of  my  mother's  voice.  I  could  see  the 
baby's  white  gown  hanging  over  her  arm  —  it  was 
the  next  one  after  Effie,  'and  already  she  must  have 
been  expecting  the  next  —  and  the  soft  screech  of 
the  rocker  on  the  deal  floor,  and  all  at  once  I  knew, 
with  what  certainty  it  hurts  me  still  to  remember, 
how  it  felt  to  be  held  so  close  .  .  .  close  .  .  .  and 
safe  .  .  .  and  the  swell  of  the  breast  under  the  song, 
and  the  swing  of  the  rocker  .  .  .  knew  it  as  if  I  had 
been  but  that  moment  dispossessed  .  .  .  and  the 
need  ...  as  I  know  now  I  have  always  needed  to 
be  so  enfolded. 

I  do  not  remember  just  what  happened;  I  seem 
to  have  come  to  from  a  fit  of  passionate  crying, 
climbed  up  out  of  it  by  a  hand  that  gripped  me  by 
the  shoulder  and  shook  me  occasionally  by  way  of  has- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  91 

tening  my  composure.  I  was  struggling  desperately 
to  get  away  from  it  ...  away  from  the  mother, 
who  held  me  so  to  the  mother  I  had  just  remem 
bered  .  .  .  and  there  was  Jule,  the  maid,  holding 
up  the  lamp,  ordering  me  to  bed  in  the  dark  for  hav 
ing  spoiled  our  quiet  evening.  Then  after  what 
seemed  a  long  time,  Effie  snuggled  up  to  me  under  the 
covers,  terrified  by  my  sudden  accession  of  sobs  but 
too  loyal  to  call  down  the  household  upon  us. 

It  came  back  .  .  .  the  need  of  mothering.  There 
was  a  time  when  I  had  lain  abed  some  days  with 
the  measles  or  whatever.  I  was  small  enough,  I  re 
member,  to  lie  in  the  crib  bed  that  was  kept  down 
stairs  for  the  prevalent  baby  .  .  .  and  my  mouth  was 
dry  with  fever.  I  recall  my  mother  standing  over 
me  and  my  being  taken  dreadfully  with  the  need 
of  that  sustaining  bosom,  and  her  stooping  to  my 
stretched  arms  divinely  .  .  .  and  then  ...  I  asked 
her  to  put  me  down  again.  I  have  had  drops  and 
sinkings,  but  nothing  to  compare  with  this,  for  there 
was  nothing  there  you  understand  .  .  .  the  release, 
the  comforting  ...  it  wasn't  there  .  .  .  it  was 
never  there  at  all! 


CHAPTER  IH 

BUT  I  began  to  tell  you  how  Ellen  McGee  and  I  in 
vented  Snockerty  and  arrived  at  our  first  contact 
with  organized  society,  at  least  Forrie  and  Effie  and 
I  did,  for  it  led  to  our  being  interdicted  the  society 
of  the  McGee  children  for  so  long  that  we  forgot  to 
inquire  what  inconvenience,  if  any,  they  suffered  on 
account  of  it. 

You  will  see  for  yourself  that  Ellen  must  have 
invented  him  —  where,  indeed,  should  a  saint- 
abhorring,  Sunday-schooled  Taylorville  child  get  the 
stuff  for  it?  God  we  knew,  and  were  greatly  bored 
by  His  inordinate  partiality  for  the  Jews  as  against 
all  ancient  peoples,  and  by  the  inquisitorial  eye  and 
ear  forever  at  the  keyhole  of  our  lives,  as  Cousin 
Judd  never  spared  to  remind  us;  and  personally  I 
was  convinced  of  a  large  friendliness  brooding  over 
Hadley's  pasture,  to  the  sense  of  which  I  woke  every 
morning  afresh,  was  called  by  it,  and  to  it;  walking 
apart  from  the  others,  I  vaguely  prayed.  But 
Snockerty  was  of  the  stripe  of  trolls,  leprechauns, 
pucks,  and  hobgoblins. 

We  began,  I  remember,  by  thinking  of  him  as  resi 
dent  in  an  old  hollow  apple  tree,  down  which,  if 
small  trifles  were  dropped,  they  fell  out  of  reach  and 

22 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  23 

sound.  There  was  the  inviting  hole,  arm  high  in  the 
apple  trunk,  into  which  you  popped  bright  pebbles, 
bits  of  glass  —  and  I  suppose  He  might  have  sprung 
very  naturally  from  the  need  of  justifying  your  hav 
ing  parted  with  something  you  valued  and  couldn't 
get  back  again,  at  the  prompting  of  an  impulse 
you  did  not  understand.  Very  presently  the  prac 
tice  grew  into  the  acknowledgment  of  a  personality 
amenable  to  our  desires. 

We  took  to  dropping  small  belongings  in  the  tree 
for  an  omen  of  the  day:  whether  the  spring  was  full 
or  not,  or  if  we  should  find  any  pawpaws  in  the  wood, 
and  drew  the  augury  from  anything  that  happened 
immediately  afterward:  say,  if  the  wind  ruffled  the 
leaves  or  if  a  rabbit  ran  out  of  the  grass. 

It  was  Ellen  who  showed  the  most  wit  in  interpret 
ing  the  signs  and  afterward  reconciling  their  incon 
sistencies,  but  it  was  I  conceived  the  notion  of 
propitiating  Snockerty,  who  by  this  time  had  come 
to  exercise  a  marked  influence  on  all  our  plays,  by  a 
species  of  dramatic  entertainment  made  up  of  scraps 
of  school  exercises,  Sunday  hymns,  recitations,  and 
particularly  of  improvisations  in  which  Ellen  and 
I  vied.  There  were  times  when,  even  in  the  midst 
of  these  ritualistic  observances,  we  would  go  off  at 
a  tangent  of  normal  play,  quite  oblivious  of  Snock 
erty;  other  times  we  were  so  worked  upon  by  our 
own  performance  as  to  make  sacrifices  of  really  valu 
able  possessions  and  variously  to  afflict  ourselves. 


24  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

It  was  I,  I  remember,  who  scared  one  of  the  little 
Allinghams  almost  into  fits  by  my  rendering  in  the 
name  of  Snockerty  of  an  anathema  which  I  had 
picked  up  somewhere,  but  it  was  Ellen  who  contrived 
to  extend  His  influence  over  the  whole  of  our  ter 
ritory  by  finding  in  every  decaying  stump  and  hol 
low  trunk,  a  means  of  communication,  and  deriving 
therefrom  authority  for  any  wild  prank  that  hap 
pened  to  come  into  her  head.  It  is  curious  that  in 
all  the  escapades  which  were  imposed  on  us  in  the 
name  of  our  deity,  for  which  we  were  duly  punished, 
not  one  word  of  the  real  cause  of  our  outbreaks  ever 
leaked  through  to  our  parents.  It  was  the  only 
thing,  I  believe,  the  little  Allinghams  never  told  their 
mother,  not  even  when  the  second  youngest  in  a 
perfect  frenzy  of  propitiation,  made  a  sacrifice  of  a 
handful  of  his  careful  curls  which  I  personally  hacked 
off  for  him  with  Forester's  pocket  knife.  He  lied 
like  a  little  gentleman  and  said  he  had  cut  them  off 
himself  because  he  was  tired  of  looking  like  a  girl 
baby. 

I  think  it  must  have  been  about  the  end  of  Snock- 
erty's  second  summer  that  Ellen's  wild  humour  got 
us  all  into  serious  trouble  which  resulted  in  my  first 
real  contact  with  authority. 

Along  the  west  side  of  Hadley's  pasture,  between 
it  and  the  county  road,  lay  the  tilled  fields  of  the  Ross 
property,  corn  and  pumpkins  and  turnips,  against 
which  a  solemn  trespass  board  advised  us.  It  was 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  25 

that  board,  no  doubt,  which  led  to  our  always  refer 
ring  to  the  owner  of  it  as  old  man  Ross,  for  except  as 
he  was  a  tall,  stooping,  white-bearded,  childless  man, 
I  do  not  know  how  he  had  deserved  our  disre 
spect.  I  have  suspected  since  that  the  trespass  sign 
did  not  originate  wholly  in  the  alleged  cantanker- 
ousness  of  farmer  Ross,  and  that  the  McGees  knew 
more  of  the  taste  of  his  young* turnips  and  roasting 
ears  than  they  admitted  at  the  time  when  Snock- 
erty  announced  to  Ellen  through  the  hollow  of  a 
dark,  gnarly  oak  at  the  foot  of  Hadley's  hill,  that  he 
would  be  acceptably  served  by  a  feast  of  green  corn 
and  turnips  out  of  Ross's  field.  This  was  the  first 
time  the  idea  of  such  a  depredation  had  occurred  to 
us,  I  believe,  for  we  were  really  good  children  in  the 
main,  but  I  do  not  think  we  had  any  notion  of  dis 
obeying.  Personally  I  rather  delighted  in  the  idea 
of  being  compelled  to  desperate  enterprises.  I  recall 
the  wild  freebooting  dash,  the  scramble  over  the 
fence,  the  rustle  of  the  corn  full  of  delicious  intima 
tions  of  ambush  and  surprise,  the  real  fear  of  coming 
suddenly  on  old  man  Ross  among  the  rows,  where  I 
suspect  we  did  a  great  deal  of  damage  in  the  search 
for  ears  suitable  to  roast,  and  the  derisive  epithets 
which  we  did  not  spare  to  fling  over  our  shoulders 
as  we  escaped  into  the  brush  with  our  booty.  There 
was  a  perfect  little  carnival  of  wickedness  in  the  safe 
hollow  where  we  stripped  the  ears  for  roasting  — 
fires  too  were  forbidden  us  —  where  we  dared  old 


26  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

man  Ross  to  come  on,  gave  dramatic  rehearsals  of 
what  we  should  do  to  him  in  that  event,  and  revelled 
in  forbidden  manners  and  interdicted  words.  I 
remember  the  delightful  shock  of  hearing  Alfred 
Allingham  declare  that  he  meant  to  get  his  belly  full 
of  green  corn  anyway,  for  belly  was  a  word  that  no 
well  brought  up  Taylorville  child  was  expected  to 
use  on  any  occasion;  and  finally  how  we  all  took 
hands  in  a  wild  dance  around  the  fire  and  over  it, 
crying, 

"  Snockerty,  Snockerty,  Snockerty  ! " 

in  a  sort  of  savage  singsong. 

Following  on  the  heels  of  that,  a  sort  of  film  came 
over  the  performance,  an  intimation  of  our  disgust 
in  each  other  at  the  connivance  of  wrongdoing. 
I  remember,  as  we  came  up  through  the  orchard 
rather  late,  this  feeling  grew  upon  us:  the  sense  of 
taint,  of  cheapness,  which  swelled  into  a  most  abom 
inable  conviction  of  guilt  as  we  discovered  old  man 
Ross  on  the  front  porch  talking  to  our  father.  And 
then  with  what  a  heaviness  of  raw  turnips  and  culpa 
bility  we  huddled  in  about  our  mother,  going  with 
brisk  movements  to  and  fro  getting  supper,  and 
how  she  cuffed  us  out  of  her  way,  not  knowing  in  the 
least  what  old  man  Ross  had  come  about.  Finally 
the  overwhelming  consciousness  of  publicity  swooped 
down  upon  us  at  my  father's  coming  in  through  the 
door,  very  white  and  angry,  wanting  to  know  if  this 
were  true  that  he  had  heard  —  and  it  was  the  utmost 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  27 

limit  of  opprobriousness  that  our  father  should  get 
to  know  of  our  misdeeds  at  all.  Times  before,  when 
we  downrightly  transgressed  by  eating  wild  crabs, 
or  taking  off  our  stockings  to  wade  in  the  brook  too 
early  in  the  season,  we  bore  our  mother's  strictures 
according  to  our  several  dispositions.  Forester,  I 
remember,  was  troubled  with  sensibility  and  used 
fairly  to  give  us  over  to  wrath  by  the  advertisement 
of  guilty  behaviour.  He  had  a  vocation  for  confes 
sion,  wept  copiously  under  whippings  which  did  him 
a  world  of  good,  and  went  about  for  days  with  a 
chastened  manner  which  irritated  me  excessively. 
I  believe  now  that  he  was  quite  sincere  in  it,  but 
there  was  a  feeling  among  the  rest  of  us  that  he  car 
ried  the  admission  of  culpability  too  far.  Myself, 
since  I  never  entered  on  disobedience  without  having 
settled  with  myself  that  the  fun  of  it  would  be  worth 
the  pains,  scorned  repentance,  and  endured  correc 
tion  with  a  philosophy  which  got  me  the  reputation  of 
being  a  hardened  and  froward  child.  That  we  did 
not,  on  this  basis,  get  into  more  serious  scrapes  was 
due  to  Effie,  who  could  never  bear  any  sort  of  un 
pleasantness.  Parents,  if  you  crossed  them,  had  a 
way  of  making  things  so  very  unpleasant. 

It  was  Effie  who,  if  we  went  to  the  neighbours  for 
a  stated  visit,  kept  her  eye  upon  the  clock,  and  if  she 
found  us  yielding  to  temptation,  was  fertile  in  the  in 
vention  of  counter  exploits  just  as  exciting  and  quite 
within  the  parental  pale,  and  when  we  did  fall,  had 


28  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

a  genius  for  extrication  as  great  as  Forester's  for  pro 
pitiatory  behaviour.  So  it  fell  out  that  our  piratical 
descent  on  Ross's  field  was  our  first  encounter  with 
an  order  of  things  that  transcended  my  mother's 
personal  jurisdiction. 

Up  to  this  time  contact  with  our  parents'  world 
had  got  no  farther  than  vainglorious  imaginings  of 
our  proper  entry  into  it,  and  now  suddenly  we  found 
that  we  were  in  it,  haled  there  by  our  own  acts  in  the 
unhappy  quality  of  offenders.  I  think  this  was  the 
first  time  in  my  life  that  I  had  been  glad  it  was  For 
ester  who  was  the  boy  and  not  I  who  was  made  to 
go  with  my  father  and  Mr.  Allingham  to  Ross's  field 
to  point  out  the  damage,  for  which  they  paid. 

It  was  this  which  sealed  the  enormity  of  our 
offence,  money  was  paid  for  it,  and  came  near  to 
losing  its  moral  point  with  Forrie,  who  felt  himself 
immeasurably  raised  in  the  estimate  of  the  other  boys 
as  a  public  character.  It  served,  along  with  my 
father's  anger,  which  was  so  new  to  us,  to  raise  the 
occasion  to  a  solemn  note  against  which  mere  switch 
ings  were  inconsiderable.  No  doubt  my  brother  has 
forgotten  it  by  now,  along  with  Effie,  who  got  off 
with  nothing  worse  than  the  complicity  of  having 
been  one  of  us,  but  to  me  the  incident  takes  rank  as 
the  beginning  of  a  new  kind  of  Snockertism  which 
was  to  array  itself  indefinitely  against  the  forces 
inappreciably  sucking  at  the  bottom  of  my  life. 

It  was  as  if,  on  the  very  first  occasion  of  my  swim- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  29 

ming  to  the  surface  of  my  lustrous  seas,  I  was  taken 
with  a  line  at  the  end  of  which  I  was  to  be  played 
into  shoals  and  shallows,  to  foul  with  my  flounder- 
ings  some  clear  pools  and  scatter  the  peace  of  many 
smaller  fry  —  I  mean  the  obligation  of  repute,  the 
necessity  of  being  loyal  to  what  I  found  in  the  world 
because  it  had  been  founded  in  sincerity  with  pains. 
For  what  my  father  made  clear  to  us  as  the  very  crux 
of  our  transgression,  was  that  we  had  discredited  our 
bringing  up.  Old  man  Ross  could  be  paid  for  his 
vegetables,  but  there  was  nothing,  I  was  given  to 
understand,  could  satisfy  our  arrears  to  our  parents' 
honour,  which,  it  transpired,  had  been  appallingly 
blackened  in  the  event. 

Nothing  in  my  whole  life  has  so  surprised  me  as  the 
capacity  of  this  single  adventure  for  involving  us  in 
successive  coils  of  turpitude  and  disaster;  though  it 
was  not  until  we  followed  my  father  into  the  best 
room  the  next  morning  after  he  had  seen  Mr.  Ailing- 
ham,  still  rather  sick,  for  the  turnips  had  not  agreed 
with  us,  that  we  realized  the  worst,  rounding  on  us 
through  a  stream  of  dreadful,  biting  things  that,  as 
my  father  uttered  them,  seemed  to  float  us  clear  be 
yond  the  pale  of  sympathy  and  hope.  I  remember 
my  father  walking  up  and  down  with  his  hands  under 
his  coat  behind,  a  short  man  in  my  recollection,  with 
a  kind  of  swing  in  his  walk  which  curiously  nobody 
but  myself  seems  to  have  noticed,  and  a  sort  of  elec 
trical  flash  in  his  manner  which  might  have  come, 


30  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

as  in  this  instance,  from  our  never  being  brought  up 
before  him  except  when  we  had  done  something 
thoroughly  exasperating:  I  am  not  sure  that  I  did 
not  tell  Ellen  McGee,  in  an  attempt  to  render  the 
magnitude  of  our  going  over,  that  he  rated  us  in  full 
uniform,  waving  his  sword,  which  at  that  moment 
hung  with  his  regimentals  over  the  mantelpiece. 

"Good  heavens,"  he  said,  "y°u  might  have 
been  arrested  for  it  —  my  children  —  mine  —  and  I 
thought  I  could  have  trusted  you.  Good  heavens!" 

Suddenly  he  reached  out  as  it  were  over  my 
brother's  shoulder,  to  whom  in  his  capacity  as  the 
eldest  son  most  of  this  tirade  was  addressed,  with  a 
word  for  me  that  was  to  go  tearing  its  way  sorely  to 
the  seat  of  memory  and  consciousness,  and,  lodging 
there,  become  the  one  point  of  attachment  to  support 
the  memory  of  him  beyond  his  death. 

"As  for  you,  Olivia,"  I  started  at  this,  for  I  had 
been  staying  my  misery  for  the  moment  on  a  red  and 
black  table  cover  which  my  mother  valued,  and  I  was 
amazed  to  find  myself  still  able  to  hate  —  "as  for 
you,  Olivia  May"  —  he  would  never  allow  my  name 
to  be  shortened  in  the  least  —  "I  am  surprised  at 
you." 

He  had  expected  better  of  me  then;  he  had  reached 
beyond  my  surfaces  and  divined  what  I  was  inarticu 
lately  sure  of,  that  I  was  different  —  no,  not  better 
—  but  somehow  intrinsically  different.  He  was  sur 
prised  at  me;  he  did  not  say  so  much  of  Forester, 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  31 

and  he  did  say  that  it  was  exactly  what  he  had  ex 
pected  of  the  McGees,  but  he  had  had  a  better 
opinion  of  me.  I  recall  a  throb  of  exasperation  at 
his  never  having  told  me.  I  might  have  lived  up  to 
it.  But  with  all  the  soreness  of  having  dropped  short 
of  a  possible  estimate,  that  phrase,  which  might 
have  gone  no  deeper  than  his  momentary  disappoint 
ment,  is  all  I  have  on  which  to  hang  the  faith  that 
perhaps  .  .  .  perhaps  some  vision  had  shaped  on  his 
horizon  of  what  I  might  become.  I  was  never  any 
thing  to  my  mother,  I  know,  but  a  cuckoo's  egg 
dropped  in  her  creditable  nest.  "But,"  said  my 
father,  "I  am  surprised  at  you." 

He  was,  I  believe,  one  of  those  men  who  make  a 
speciality  of  integrity  and  of  great  dependability  in 
public  service,  which  is  often  brought  to  answer  for 
the  want  of  private  success;  an  early  republican  type 
fast  being  relegated  to  small  towns  and  country 
neighbourhoods.  He  had  a  brilliant  war  record 
which  was  partly  responsible  for  his  office,  and  a 
string  of  debts  pendent  from  some  earlier  mercantile 
enterprise,  which,  in  the  occasion  they  afforded  of 
paying  up  under  circumstances  of  great  stringency, 
appeared  somehow  an  additional  burnish  to  his  name. 
He  was  a  man  everybody  liked;  that  he  was  ex 
tremely  gentle  and  gay  in  his  manner  with  us  on 
most  occasions,  I  remember  very  well,  and  I  think 
he  must  have  had  a  vein  of  romance,  though  I  do  not 
know  upon  what  grounds  except  that  among  the  few 


32  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

books  that  he  left,  many  were  of  that  character,  and 
from  the  names  of  his  children,  Forester,  Olivia  May, 
and  Ephemia,  called  Effie  for  short,  which  were 
certainly  not  Taylorvillian.  Forester  grew  out  of  a 
heroic  incident  of  his  soldiering,  of  which  I  have  for 
gotten  all  the  particulars  except  that  the  other  man's 
name  was  Forester,  and  my  father's  idea  of  giving  it 
to  his  son  who  was  born  about  that  time,  was  that 
when  he  should  grow  up,  and  be  distinguished,  the 
double  name  of  Forester  Lattimore  should  serve  at 
once  as  a  reminder  and  a  certificate  of  appreciation. 
I  recall  that  we  children,  or  perhaps  it  was  only  I, 
used  to  abound  in  dramatic  imaginings  of  what 
would  happen  when  this  belated  recognition  took 
place,  though  in  fact  nothing  ever  came  of  it,  which 
might  have  been  largely  owing  to  my  brother's 
turning  out  the  least  distinguished  of  men. 

Whether  if  my  father  had  lived  he  would  have  re 
mained  always  as  much  in  the  dark  as  to  the  private 
sources  of  my  behaviour,  I  try  not  to  guess,  but  this 
incident  picked  him  out  for  me  among  the  ruck  of 
fathers  as  a  man  distinguished  for  propriety,  pro 
duced,  in  the  very  moment  of  pronouncing  me  un 
worthy  of  it,  the  ideal  of  a  personal  standard.  If  he 
hadn't  up  to  this  time  affected  greatly  my  gratitude 
or  affections,  he  began  to  shine  for  me  now  with 
some  of  the  precious  quality  which  inheres  in  dreams. 
And  before  the  shine  had  gone  off  I  lost  him. 


CHAPTER  IV 

MY  FATHER'S  death,  which  occurred  the  March  fbfc, 
lowing,  came  suddenly,  wholly  fortuitous  to  the 
outward  eye,  and  I  have  heard  my  mother  say,  in  its 
inconsequence,  its  failure  to  line  up  with  any  con 
ceivable  moral  occasion,  did  much  to  shake  her  faith 
in  a  controlling  Providence;  but  affects  me  still  as 
then,  as  the  most  incontrovertible  of  evidences  of 
Powers  moving  at  large  among  men,  occupied  with 
other  affairs  than  ours.  A  little  while  ago,  as  I  sat 
writing  here  on  my  veranda,  looking  riverward,  an 
ant  ran  across  my  paper,  which  I  blew  out  with  my 
breath  into  space,  and  I  did  not  look  to  see  what 
disaster.  It  reminded  me  suddenly  of  the  way  I  felt 
about  my  father's  taking  off.  He  was,  he  must  have 
been,  in  the  way  of  some  god  that  March  morning; 
that  is  one  of  the  evidences  by  which  you  know  that 
there  are  gods  at  all.  You  play  happily  about  their 
knees,  sometimes  they  play  with  you,  then  you  stum 
ble  against  a  foot  thrust  out,  or  the  clamour  of  your 
iniquity  disturbs  their  proper  meditations,  and  sud- 
dently  you  are  silenced.  My  mother  was  doubtless 
right;  it  would  have  been  better  if  he  had  stayed  with 
her  and  the  children,  certainly  happier,  but  he  got  in 
the  way  of  the  Powers. 

33 


34  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

It  is  curious  that  until  I  began  just  now  to  recon 
struct  the  circumstances  in  which  the  news  of  his 
death  came  to  me,  I  never  realized  that  I  might  have 
been  looking  on,  but  high  above  it,  at  the  very  in 
stant  and  occasion.  From  the  window  of  my  room 
in  the  second  story  of  the  Taylorville  grammar 
school  I  could  see  the  unfinished  walls  of  the  Zim- 
mern  block  aglimmer  with  the  light  which  the  wind 
heaped  up  and  shattered  against  their  raw  pink  sur 
faces,  and  a  loose  board  of  the  scaffolding  allowed  to 
remain  up  all  winter,  flacking  like  a  torn  leaf  in  the 
mighty  current  in  which  the  school  building,  all  the 
buildings,  shook  with  the  steady  tremor  of  reeds  in  a 
freshet.  Between  them  the  tops  of  the  maples, 
level  like  a  shorn  hedge,  kept  up  an  immensity  of 
tormented  motion  that  invaded  even  the  schoolroom 
with  a  sense  of  its  insupportable  fatigues.  I  re 
member  there  were  few  at  their  desks  that  day,  and 
all  the  discipline  relaxed  by  the  confusion  of  the 
wind.  At  the  morning  recess  there  had  been  some 
debate  about  dismissing  the  session,  and  one  of  the 
young  teachers  on  the  third  floor  had  grown  hysteri 
cal  and  been  reprimanded  by  the  principal. 

It  must  have  been  about  eleven  of  the  clock,  while 
I  was  watching  the  little  puffs  of  dust  that  rose  be 
tween  the  planks  of  the  flooring  whenever  the  build 
ing  shuddered  and  ground  its  teeth,  divided  between 
an  affectation  of  timorousness  which  seemed  to  grow 
in  favour  as  a  suitable  frame  of  behaviour,  and  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  35 

rapid  rise  of  every  tingling  sense  to  the  spacious 
movement  of  the  weather  and  my  private  dramati 
zation  of  the  demolition  of  the  building,  from  which 
only  such  occupants  as  I  favoured  should  be  rescued 
by  my  signal  behaviour.  Already  several  children 
had  been  abstracted  by  anxious  parents,  so  that  I 
failed  to  be  even  startled  by  another  knocking  until 
my  attention  was  attracted  by  the  teacher  opening 
the  door,  and  opening  it  wide  upon  my  Uncle  Alva. 

I  saw  him  step  back  with  a  motion  of  his  head  side- 
wise,  to  draw  her  after  him,  but  it  took  all  the  sug 
gestive  nods  and  winks  that,  as  she  drew  it  shut  be 
hind  her,  were  focussed  on  my  desk,  to  pull  me  up  to 
the  realization  that  his  visit  must  have  something  to 
do  with  me.  It  was  not,  in  fact,  until  I  was  halfway 
down  the  aisle  after  Miss  Jessel  called  me,  that  I 
recovered  my  surprise  sufficiently  to  assume  the 
mysteriously  important  air  that  was  proper  to  the 
fifth  grade  on  being  privileged  to  answer  the  door. 

There  was  not,  I  am  sure,  in  the  brief  information 
that  I  was  wanted  at  home,  one  betraying  syllable; 
nothing  sufficiently  unusual  in  the  way  Miss  Jessel 
tied  me  into  my  hood,  nor  in  finding  Effie  tied  into 
hers  on  the  first  floor,  nor  in  the  way  her  teacher 
kissed  her  —  everybody  kissed  Effie  who  was  al 
lowed  —  nothing  in  Forester's  having  already  cleared 
out  without  waiting  for  us.  We  got  into  the  town 
in  the  wake  of  Uncle  Alva  and  between  the  business 
blocks  where  the  tall  buildings  abated  the  wind. 


36  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

There  was  no  traffic  in  the  streets  that  day.  Here 
and  there  a  foot  passenger  with  his  hat  held  down  by 
both  hands  and  his  coat  tails  between  his  legs,  stag 
gered  into  doorways  which  were  snapped  to  behind 
him,  and  from  the  glass  of  which  faces  looked  out 
featureless  in  the  blur  of  the  wind.  As  we  passed 
the  side  door  of  a  men's  clothing  establishment  one 
of  these  pale  human  orbs  approached  to  the  pane, 
exhibited  a  peering  movement,  rapped  on  the  glass 
and  beckoned.  I  know  now  this  must  have  been 
the  working  of  an  instinct  to  which  Taylorville  was 
so  habituated  that  it  seemed  natural  to  Uncle  Alva 
—  he  was  only  my  mother's  half  brother,  not  my 
father's  —  to  send  us  on  with  a  word  about  overtaking 
us,  while  he  crossed  the  street  at  the  instance  of  that 
beckoning  finger  to  be  chaffered  with  in  the  matter 
of  my  father's  grave  clothes.  All  this  time  there 
was  not  a  word  spoken  that  could  convey  to  us 
children  the  import  of  our  unexpected  release.  We 
drifted  down  the  street,  Effie  and  I,  sidling  against 
the  blasts  that  drove  furiously  in  the  crossways,  and 
finally  as  we  caught  our  breath  under  a  long  red 
sandstone  building,  I  recall  being  taken  violently, 
as  it  were,  by  knowledge,  and  crying  out  that  my 
father  was  dead,  that  he  was  dead  and  I  should  never 
see  him  again.  I  do  not  know  how  I  knew,  but  I 
knew,  and  Effie  accepted  it;  she  came  cuddling  up  to 
me  in  the  smother  of  the  wind,  trying  to  comfort  me 
as  if,  as  I  think  did  not  occur  to  her,  he  had  been  my 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  37 

father  only  and  not  hers  at  all.  I  do  not  recall  very 
well  how  we  got  across  the  town  between  the  shut 
houses,  high  shouldered  with  the  cold,  except  that 
Uncle  Alva  did  not  come  up  with  us,  and  the  vast 
lapping  of  the  wind  that  swirled  us  together  at  inter 
vals  in  a  community  of  breathlessness,  seemed  some 
how  to  have  grown  out  of  the  occasion  and  be  nat 
urally  commensurate  with  its  desolating  quality. 
I  do  not  think  it  occurred  to  us  as  strange  that  we 
should  have  been  left  so  to  come  to  the  knowledge 
that  grew  until,  as  we  came  in  sight  of  our  home,  we 
were  fairly  taken  aback  to  find  it  so  little  altered  from 
what  it  had  been  when  we  left  it  three  hours  before. 
It  had  never  been  an  attractive  house :  yellow  painted, 
with  chocolate  trimmings  and  unshuttered  windows 
against  which  the  wind  contrived.  It  cowered  in  a 
wide  yard  full  of  unpruned  maples  that  now  held  up 
their  limbs  protestingly,  that  shook  off  from  their 
stretched  boughs,  disclaimers  of  responsibility;  the 
very  smoke  wrenched  itself  from  the  chimney  and 
escaped,  hurryingly  upon  the  wind;  the  shrubbery 
wrung  itself;  whole  flights  of  fallen  leaves  that  had 
settled  soddenly  beside  the  borders  all  the  winter, 
having  at  last  got  a  plain  sight  of  it,  whirled  up 
aghast  and  fled  along  the  road.  The  blinds  were  down 
at  the  front  windows,  and  no  one  came  in  or  out. 

I  remember  our  hanging  there  on  the  opposite  side 
of  the  street  for  an  appreciable  interval  before  trust 
ing  ourselves  to  a  usualness  which  every  moment  be- 


38  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

gan  to  appear  more  frightening,  and  being  snatched 
back  from  the  brink  of  panic  by  the  rattle  of  wheels 
in  the  road  behind  us  as  a  light  buggy,  all  aglitter 
from  point  to  point  of  its  natty  furnishings,  drew  up 
at  our  gate  and  discharged  from  the  seat  beside  the 
driver  a  youngish  man,  all  of  a  piece  with  the  turn 
out,  in  the  trim  and  shining  blackness  of  his  exterior, 
who,  with  a  kind  of  subdued  tripping,  ran  up  the 
walk  and  entered  at  the  door  without  a  knock.  I 
am  not  sure  that  Effie  identified  him  as  the  man  who 
had  taken  away  the  babies,  indeed,  the  two  who 
came  after  Effie  were  so  close  together  and  went  so 
soon,  that  I  have  heard  her  say  that  she  has  no  rec 
ollection  of  anything  except  a  house  enlivened  by 
continuous  baby;  but  she  had  the  knowledge  com 
mon  to  every  Taylorville  child  of  the  undertaker  as 
the  only  man  who  was  let  softly  in  at  unknocked 
doors,  with  his  frock  coat  buttoned  tight  and  the  rim 
of  his  black  hat  held  against  his  freshly  shaven  chin. 
We  snatched  the  knowledge  from  one  another  as  we 
caught  hands  together  and  fairly  dove  into  the  side 
entrance  that  opened  on  the  living  room. 

The  first  thing  I  was  aware  of  was  the  sound  of 
Forester  blubbering,  and  then  of  the  place  being  full 
of  neighbours  and  my  mother  sitting  by  the  fire  in 
a  chair  out  of  the  best  room,  crying  heartily.  We 
flung  ourselves  upon  her,  crying  too,  and  were  gath 
ered  up  in  a  violence  of  grief  and  rocking,  through 
which  I  could  hear  a  great  many  voices  in  a  kind  of 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  39 

frightened  and  extenuating  remonstrance,  *'Come 

now,  Mrs.  Lattimore.   Now  Sally — there,  there " 

at  every  word  of  which  my  mother's  sobbing  broke 
out  afresh.  I  remember  getting  done  with  my  cry 
ing  first  and  being  very  hot  and  uncomfortable  and 
thinking  of  nothing  but  how  I  should  wriggle  out 
of  her  embrace  and  get  away,  anywhere  to  escape 
from  the  burden  of  having  to  seem  to  care;  and  then, 
but  whether  it  was  immediately  after  I  am  not  sure, 
going  rather  heavily  upstairs  and  being  overtaken  in 
the  middle  of  it  by  the  dramatic  suggestion  of  myself 
as  an  orphan  child  toiling  through  the  world  —  I 
dare  say  I  had  read  something  like  that  recently  — 
and  carrying  out  the  suggestion  with  an  immense 
effect  on  Uncle  Alva,  who  happened  to  be  coming 
down  at  that  moment.  And  then  the  insidious 
spread  through  all  my  soul  of  cold  disaster,  out  of 
which  I  found  myself  unable  to  rise  even  to  the  ap 
pearance  of  how  much  I  cared. 

Of  all  that  time  my  father  lay  dead  in  the  best 
room,  for  by  the  usual  Taylorville  procedure  the 
funeral  could  not  take  place  until  the  afternoon  of 
the  second  day,  I  have  only  snatches  of  remem-! 
brance:  of  my  being  taken  in  to  look  at  him  as  he  lay 
in  the  coffin  in  a  very  nice  coat  which  I  had  never 
seen  him  wear,  and  the  sudden  conviction  I  had  of 
its  somehow  being  connected  with  that  mysterious 
summons  which  had  taken  Uncle  Alva  away  from 
us  that  morning  in  the  street;  of  the  "sitting  up," 


40  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

which  was  done  both  nights  by  groups  of  neigh 
bours,  mostly  young;  and  the  festive  air  it  had  with 
the  table  spread  with  the  best  cloth  and  notable 
delicacies;  and  mine  and  Forester's  reprisals  against 
one  another  as  to  the  impropriety  of  squabbling  over 
the  remains  of  a  layer  cake.  And  particularly  of 
Cousin  Judd. 

He  came  about  dusk  from  the  farm  —  he  had  been 
sent  for  —  looking  shocked,  and  yet  with  a  kind  of 
enjoyable  solemnity,  I  thought;  and  the  first  thing 
he  wished  to  do  was  to  pray  with  my  poor  mother. 

"We  must  submit  ourselves  to  the  will  of  God, 
Sally,"  he  urged. 

"O  God!  God!"  said  my  mother,  walking  up  and 
down.  "I'm  not  so  sure  God  had  anything  to  do 
with  it." 

"It's  a  wrong  spirit,  Sally,  a  wrong  spirit  —  a  spirit 
of  rebellion."  My  mother  began  to  cry. 

"Why  couldn't  God  have  left  him  alone?  What 
had  he  done  that  he  should  be  taken  away?  What 
have  7  done " 

"You  mustn't  take  it  like  this,  Sally.  Think  of 
your  duty  to  your  children.  *  The  Lord  giveth' " 

"Go  tell  Him  to  give  me  back  my  husband, 
then " 

Effie  and  I  cowered  in  our  corner  between  the  base 
burner  and  the  sewing  machine;  it  was  terrible  to 
hear  them  so,  quarrelling  about  God.  My  mother 
had  her  hands  to  her  head  as  she  walked;  her  figure 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  41 

touched  by  the  firelight,  not  quite  spoiled  by  child- 
bearing,  looked  young  to  me. 

"Oh!    Oh!    Oh!"  she  cried  with  every  step. 

"You  mustn't,  Sally;  you'll  be  punished  for 
it " 

Cousin  Judd  shook  with  excitement;  he  was  bully 
ing  her  about  her  Christian  submission.  I  went  up 
to  him  suddenly  and  struck  him  on  the  arm  with  my 
fist. 

"You  let  her  alone!"  I  cried.   "Let  her  alone!" 

Somebody  spoke  out  sharply,  I  think;  a  hand 
plucked  me  from  behind  —  to  my  amazement  my 
mother's. 

"Olivia,  Olivia  May!  I  am  surprised  .  .  .  and 
your  father  not  out  of  the  house  yet.  Go  up  to  your 
room  and  see  if  you  can't  learn  to  control  yourself!" 

After  all  there  was  some  excuse  for  Cousin  Judd. 
There  was,  in  the  general  estimate,  something  more 
than  fortuitous  circumstance  that  went  to  my  father's 
taking  off.  Early  in  the  winter,  when  work  had  been 
stopped  on  the  Zimmern  building,  there  had  been  a 
good  deal  of  talk  about  some  local  regulations  as  to 
the  removal  of  scaffolding  and  the  security  of  foot  pas 
sengers.  That  the  contractors  had  not  been  brought 
to  book  about  it  was  thought  to  be  due  to  official  con 
nivance;  my  father  had  written  to  the  paper  about  it. 
But  the  scaffolding  had  remained  until  that  morning 
of  the  high  wind,  when  it  came  down  all  together  and 
a  bit  of  the  wall  with  it.  That  my  father  should 


42  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

have  been  passing  on  his  way  to  the  courthouse  at 
the  moment,  was  a  leaping  together  of  circumstances 
that  seemed  somehow  to  have  raised  it  to  the  plane 
of  a  moral  instance.  It  provided  just  that  element 
of  the  dramatic  in  human  affairs,  which  somehow 
wakens  the  conviction  of  having  always  expected 
it;  though  it  hardly  appeared  why  my  father,  rather 
than  the  contractor  or  the  conniving  city  official, 
should  have  been  the  victim.  If  it  wasn't  an  act  of 
Providence,  it  was  so  like  one  that  it  contributed  to 
bring  out  to  the  funeral  more  people  than  might 
otherwise  have  ventured  themselves  in  such  weather. 
It  was  also  thought  that  if  anything  of  that  nature 
could  have  made  up  to  her,  my  mother  should  have 
found  much  to  console  her  in  the  funeral.  The 
Masons  took  part  in  it,  as  also  the  G.  A.  R.  and  the 
Republican  Club,  though  they  might  have  made  a 
more  imposing  show  of  numbers  if  all  the  societies 
had  not  been  so  largely  composed  of  the  same  mem 
bers.  In  addition  to  all  this,  my  mother's  crape 
came  quite  to  the  hem  of  her  dress  and  Effie  and  I 
had  new  hats.  I  remember  those  hats  very  well; 
they  had  very  tall  crowns  and  narrow  brims  and 
velvet  trimmings,  and  we  tried  them  on  for  Pauline 
Allingham  after  we  had  gone  up  to  bed  the  night 
before  the  funeral.  Mrs.  Allingham  had  called  and 
Pauline  had  been  allowed  to  come  up  to  us.  I  re 
member  her  asking  how  we  felt,  and  Effie's  being  as 
much  impressed  by  the  way  in  which  I  carried  off  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  43 

situation  as  if  she  had  not  been  in  the  least  concerned 
in  it.  And  then  we  sat  up  in  bed  in  our  nightgowns 
and  tried  on  the  hats  while  Pauline  walked  about  to 
get  the  effect  from  both  sides,  and  refrained,  in  re 
spect  to  the  occasion,  from  offering  any  criticism 

It  was  the  evening  after  the  funeral  and  every 
body  had  gone  away  but  one  good  neighbour.  The 
room  had  been  set  in  order  while  we  were  away  at 
the  cemetery;  the  lamp  was  lit  and  there  was  a  red 
glow  on  everything  from  the  deep  heart  of  the  base 
burner.  The  woman  went  about  softly  to  set  a 
meal  for  us,  and  under  the  lamp  there  was  a  great 
bowl  of  quince  marmalade  which  she  had  brought 
over  neighbourly  from  her  own  stores;  the  colour  of 
it  played  through  the  clear  glass  like  a  stain  upon  the 
white  cloth.  It  happened  to  have  been  a  favourite 
dish  of  my  father's. 

For  the  last  year  it  had  been  a  family  use,  he  being 
delicate  in  his  appetite,  to  make  a  point  of  saving 
for  him  anything  which  he  might  possibly  eat,  and 
taking  the  greatest  satisfaction  in  his  enjoyment. 
Therefore  it  came  quite  natural  for  me  to  get  a  small 
dish  from  the  cupboard  and  begin  to  serve  out  a  por 
tion  of  Mrs.  Mason's  preserves  for  my  father.  All 
at  once  it  came  over  me  .  .  .  the  meaning  of  be 
reavement;  that  there  was  nobody  to  be  done  for  ten 
derly;  the  loss  of  it  .  .  .  the  need  of  the  heart  for 
all  its  offices  of  loving  .  .  .  and  the  unavailing  pain. 


CHAPTER  V 

IT  FOLLOWED  soon  on  my  father's  death  that  we 
gave  up  the  yellow  house  with  the  chocolate  trim 
mings  and  took  another  near  the  high  school,  and 
that  very  summer  my  mother  lengthened  my  skirts 
halfway  to  my  shoe  tops  and  began  to  find  fault 
with  my  behaviour  "for  a  girl  of  your  age."  We  saw 
no  more  of  the  McGees  after  that  except  as  Ellen 
managed  to  keep  on  in  the  same  class  at  school  with 
me;  and  Pauline  and  I  found  ourselves  with  a  bosom 
friendship  on  our  hands. 

I  went  on  missing  my  father  terribly,  but  in  a 
child's  inarticulate  fashion,  and  it  is  only  lately  that 
I  have  realized  how  much  of  my  life  went  at  loose 
ends  for  the  loss  out  of  it  of  a  man's  point  of  view 
and  the  appreciable  standards  which  grow  out  of  his 
relation  to  the  community.  Ever  since  the  Snock- 
erty  episode  there  had  been  glimmers  on  my  horizon 
of  the  sort  of  Tightness  owing  from  a  daughter  of 
Henry  Lattimore,  but  now  that  I  had  no  longer  the 
use  of  the  personal  instance,  I  lost  all  notion  of  what 
those  things  might  be;  for  though  I  have  often  heard 
my  mother  spoken  of  as  one  of  the  best  women  in 
the  world,  she  was  the  last  to  have  provided  me  with 
a  definite  pattern  of  behaviour. 

44 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  45 

Pauline  had  struck  out  a  sort  of  social  balance  for 
herself  grounded  on  the  fear  of  what  was  "common." 
Her  mother  had  a  day  at  home,  from  which  seemed 
to  flow  an  orderly  perspective  of  social  observances, 
for  which  my  mother,  never  having  arrived  at  the 
pitch  of  visiting  cards,  afforded  me  no  criterion 
whatever. 

She  had  been  a  farmer's  daughter  in  another  part 
of  the  state,  and  had  done  something  for  herself  in  the 
way  of  school  teaching  before  she  married  my  father. 
My  grandparents  I  never  saw,  but  I  seem  to  recall  at 
such  public  occasions  as  county  fairs  and  soldiers' 
reunions,  certain  tall,  farmer-looking  men  and  their 
badly  dressed  wives,  who  called  her  cousin  and  were 
answered  by  their  Christian  names,  whom  I  under 
stand  to  be  my  mother's  relatives  without  accepting 
them  as  mine.  They  were  all  soldiers  though,  the 
men  of  our  family;  you  saw  it  at  once  in  the  odd  stiff 
ness  sitting  on  their  farmer  carriage  like  the  firm 
strokes  of  a  master  on  a  pupil's  smudged  drawing. 
I  think  I  got  my  first  notion  of  the  quality  of  ex 
perience  in  the  way  they  exalted  themselves  in  the 
memories  of  marches  and  battles.  There  had  been 
a  station  of  the  underground  railway  not  ten  miles 
from  Taylorville,  and  there  had  gone  out  from  the 
town  at  the  first  call,  a  volunteer  company  with  so 
many  Judds  and  Wilsons  and  Lattimores  on  the 
roster  that  it  read  like  the  record  of  a  family  Bible. 
They  had  gone  out  from,  they  had  come  back  to,  a 


46  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

life  as  little  relieved  by  adventure  as  the  flat  horizon 
of  their  corn  lands,  but  in  the  interim  they  had 
stretched  themselves,  endured,  conquered.  I  have 
heard  political  economists  of  the  cross  roads  account 
variously  for  the  prosperity  of  Ohianna  in  the  decade 
following  the  civil  outbreak,  but  I  have  never  heard 
it  laid  to  the  revitalizing  of  our  common  stock  by  the 
shock  of  its  moral  strenuosities. 

To  this  day  I  question  whether  Cousin  Judd  got 
more  out  of  his  religion  than  out  of  this  most  un 
christian  experience,  from  which  he  had  come  back 
silver  tipped  as  it  were,  from  that  emperym  into 
which  men  pass  when  they  are  by  great  emotions  a 
little  removed  from  themselves,  to  kindle  in  my  young 
mind  a  realization  of  the  preciousness  of  passion  over 
all  human  assets.  It  came  to  me,  however,  in  the 
years  between  twelve  and  fifteen  that  my  mother's 
relatives  did  things  with  their  knives  and  neglected 
others  with  their  forks  that  were  not  done  in  circles 
that  by  virtue  of  just  such  observances,  got  them 
selves  called  Good  Society.  I  was  aware  of  a  sort 
of  gracelessness  in  their  vital  processes,  in  much  the 
same  way  that  I  knew  that  the  striped  and  flowered 
carpet  in  my  mother's  best  room  did  not  harmonize 
with  the  wall  paper,  and  that  the  curtains  went  badly 
with  them  both.  I  have  to  go  back  to  this,  and  to 
the  fact  that  my  clothes  were  chosen  for  wearing 
qualities  rather  than  becomingness,  to  account  for 
a  behaviour  that,  as  I  began  to  emerge  from  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  47 

illumined  mists  of  play,  my  mother  complained  of 
under  the  head  of  my  "not  taking  an  interest." 

How  else  was  I  to  protect  myself  from  the  thou 
sand  inharmonies  that  chafed  against  the  budding 
instinct  of  beauty:  the  plum-coloured  ribbons  I  was 
expected  to  wear  with  my  brown  dress,  the  mottled 
Japanese  pattern  upon  the  gilt  ground  of  the  wall 
paper,  against  which  I  had  pushed  out  a  kind  of  shell, 
hung  within  with  the  glittering  stuff  of  dreams. 

For  just  about  the  time  I  should  have  been  ab 
sorbed  in  Cousin  Lydia's  beaded  dolman  and  the 
turning  of  my  mother's  one  silk,  I  was  regularly 
victimized  by  the  fits  and  starts  of  temperament,  in 
stinctive  efforts  toward  the  rehearsal  of  greater  pas 
sions  than  had  appeared  above  my  horizon,  flashes 
of  red  and  blue  and  gold  thrown  up  on  the  plain 
Taylorville  surface  of  my  behaviour,  with  the  result 
of  putting  me  at  odds  with  the  Taylorvillians. 

It  was  as  if,  being  required  to  produce  a  character, 
I  found  myself  with  samples  of  a  great  many  sorts  on 
my  hands  which  I  kept  offering,  hopeful  that  they 
might  be  found  to  match  with  the  acceptable  article, 
which,  I  may  say  here,  they  never  did.  They  were 
good  samples  too,  considering  how  young  I  was,  of  the 
Magdas,  Ophelias,  Antigones  I  was  yet  to  become, 
of  the  great  lady,  good  comrade  and  lover,  but  the 
most  I  got  by  it  was  the  suspicion  of  insincerity  and 
affectation.  I  sensitively  suffered  the  more  from 
it  as  I  was  conscious  of  the  veering  of  this  inward 


48  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

direction,  without  being  able  to  prove  what  I  was 
sure  of,  its  relevance  to  the  Shining  Destiny  toward 
which  I  moved.  If  you  ask  how  this  assurance  dif 
fered  from  the  general  human  hope  of  a  superior 
happiness,  I  can  only  say  that  the  event  has  proved 
it,  and  as  early  as  I  was  aware  of  it,  moved  me  child 
ishly  to  acts  of  propitiation.  I  wanted  gratefully  to 
be  good,  with  a  goodness  acceptable  to  the  Powers 
from  which  such  assurance  flowed,  but  it  was  a  long 
time  before  I  could  separate  my  notion  of  this  from 
my  earliest  ideal  of  what  would  have  been  suitable 
behaviour  to  my  father,  so  that  all  the  upward  reach 
of  adolescence  was  tinged  by  my  sense  of  loss  in  him. 
It  was  when  I  was  about  thirteen  and  had  not  yet 
forgotten  how  my  father  looked,  that  I  made  an  im 
portant  discovery;  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  church, 
and  close  to  the  Amen  corner,  sat  a  man  with  some 
thing  in  the  cut  of  his  beard,  in  the  swing  of  his 
shoulders,  at  which  some  dying  nerve  started  sud 
denly  athrob.  I  must  have  seen  him  there  a  great 
many  times  without  noticing,  and  perhaps  the  like 
ness  was  not  so  much  as  I  had  thought,  and  I  had 
had  to  wait  until  my  recollection  faded  to  its  note 
of  faint  suggestion,  but  from  that  day  I  took  to  go 
ing  out  of  my  way  to  school  to  pass  by  Mr.  Gower's 
place  of  business  for  the  sake  of  the  start  of  memory 
that  for  the  moment  brought  my  father  near  again. 
I  even  went  so  far  as  to  mention  to  my  mother  that 
I  liked  sitting  in  church  where  I  could  look  at  Mr. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  49 

Gower  because  he  reminded  me  of  somebody.  We 
were  on  our  way  home  on  Sunday  night  —  we  were 
always  taken  to  church  twice  on  Sunday  — 
Forester  was  on  ahead  with  Effie,  and  just  as  we 
came  along  under  the  shadow  of  the  spool  factory,  I 
had  reached  up  to  tuck  my  hand  under  my  mother's 
arm  and  make  my  timid  suggestion. 

"Well,  somebody  who?"  said  my  mother. 

"Of  my  father " 

"Oh,"  said  my  mother,  "that's  just  your  fancy." 
But  she  did  not  shake  off  my  hand  from  her  arm  as 
was  her  habit  toward  proffers  of  affection,  and  the 
moment  passed  for  one  of  confidence  between  us.  I 
was  convinced  that  she  must  have  taken  notice  of  the 
likeness  for  herself.  That  was  in  the  spring,  and  all 
that  summer  vacation  I  spent  a  great  deal  of  time 
playing  with  Nettie  Gower  for  the  sake  of  seeing  her 
father  come  at  the  gate  about  five  in  the  afternoon 
the  way  mine  had  done. 

Nettie  was  not  an  attractive  child,  and  of  an  age 
better  suited  to  Effie,  who  couldn't  bear  her;  the  re 
lation,  it  seemed,  wanted  an  explanation,  but  it  never 
occurred  to  me  that  so  long  as  I  withheld  my  own, 
another  would  be  found  for  it.  Nettie's  brother  found 
it  about  the  time  that  my  friendship  with  his  sister 
was  at  its  most  flourishing.  He  was  no  nicer  than 
you  would  expect  a  brother  of  Nettie's  to  be,  though 
he  was  good-looking  in  a  red-cheeked  way,  with  a 
flattened  curl  in  the  middle  of  his  forehead,  and  of 


50  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

late  he  had  taken  to  hanging  about  Nettie  and  me, 
looking  at  me  with  a  curious  sort  of  smirk  that  I  was 
not  quite  arrived  at  knowing  for  the  beginning 
gallantry.  He  knew  perfectly  well  that  I  did  not 
come  to  see  Nettie  because  I  was  fond  of  her,  but 
it  was  yet  for  me  to  discover  that  he  thought  it  was 
because  I  was  fond  of  him.  I  remember  I  was  mak 
ing  a  bower  in  the  asparagus  bed;  I  was  too  old  to 
play  in  the  asparagus  bed,  but  I  was  making  a  point  of 
being  good  enough  to  do  it  on  Nettie's  account,  and 
I  had  asked  Charlie  for  his  knife  to  cut  the  stems. 

"  Come  and  get  it."  He  was  holding  it  out  to  me 
hollowed  in  his  palm;  and  he  would  not  let  go  my 
hand. 

"You  don't  want  no  knife,"  he  leered  sickeningly. 
"I  know  what  you  want."  Suddenly  I  caught  sight 
of  Nettie's  face  with  its  straight  thick  plaits  of  hair 
and  near-sighted  eyes  narrowed  at  me  behind  her 
glasses,  and  it  struck  me  all  at  once  that  she  had 
never  taken  my  interest  in  her  seriously  either. 

"Well,  what?"  I  began  defensively. 

"This!"  He  thrust  out  his  face  toward  mine, 
but  I  was  too  quick  for  him.  That  was  my  first 
sex  encounter,  and  it  didn't  somehow  make  it  any 
the  less  exasperating  to  realize  that  what  lay  behind 
my  sudden  interest  in  Nettie  couldn't  now  be  brought 
forward  in  extenuation,  but  I  am  always  glad  that 
I  slapped  Charlie  Gower  before  the  paralyzing  sense 
of  being  trapped  by  my  own  behaviour  overtook  me. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  51 

I  hadn't  found  the  words  yet  for  the  unimagined  dis 
gust  of  the  boy's  impertinence  when,  as  I  was  help 
ing  to  wipe  the  dishes  that  evening  after  supper,  I 
tried  to  put  it  to  my  mother  on  a  new  basis  which  the 
incident  seemed  to  have  created,  of  our  being  some 
how  ranged  together  against  such  offences.  It  was 
the  time  for  us  to  have  emerged  a  little  from  the 
family  relation  to  the  freemasonry  of  sex,  but  my 
mother  missed  knowing  it. 

"I  am  not  going  to  Nettie  Gower  s  any  more, "  I 
began. 

"No?"  said  my  mother;  and  of  course  I  could  not 
conceive  that  she  had  forgotten  the  confidence  in 
which  the  connection  with  Nettie  began. 

"That  Charlie  *,  „  .  I  just  hate  him.  You 
know,  he  thought  I  was  coming  to  see  Nettie  because 
of  him." 

"Well,"  said  my  mother,  turning  out  the  dish 
water,  "perhaps  you  were." 

And  that,  I  think  it  safe  to  say,  is  as  near  as  my 
family  ever  came  to  understanding  the  processes  at 
work  behind  the  incidents  of  my  growing  up.  Yet 
I  think  my  mother  very  often  did  know  that  the  key 
to  my  behaviour  did  not  lie  in  the  obvious  explana 
tion  of  it;  and  a  sort  of  aversion  toward  what  was 
strange,  which  I  have  come  to  think  of  as  growing  out 
of  her  unsophistication,  kept  her  from  admitting  it. 
It  was  less  disconcerting  to  have  my  springs  of  action 
accounted  for  on  the  basis  of  what  Mrs.  Allingham 


52  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

would  have  called  "common,"  than  to  have  it  ar 
raigned  by  her  own  standard  as  "queer."  There  was 
always  in  Taylorville  a  certain  caddishness  toward 
innovations  of  conduct,  which  we  youngsters  railed 
at  as  countrified,  which  I  now  perceive  to  have  been 
no  worse  than  the  instinctive  movement  to  lessen 
by  despising  it,  the  terror,  the  deep,  far-rooted  ter 
ror  of  the  unknown.  The  incident  served,  however, 
to  supersede  with  resentment  the  sense  of  personal 
definite  loss  in  which  it  had  begun. 

Before  the  year  was  out  I  had  so  far  forgotten  my 
father  that  I  saw  no  resemblance  to  him  in  Mr. 
Gower  and  would  not  have  recognized  it  had  I  met 
it  anywhere,  though  the  want  of  fathering  had  its 
share  no  doubt  in  landing  me,  as  I  cast  about  for  an 
appreciable  rule  to  live  by,  in  what  I  have  already 
described  as  a  superior  sort  of  Snockertism.  The 
immediate  step  to  it  was  my  getting  converted. 
That  very  winter  all  Taylorville  and  the  six  town 
ships  were  caught  up  in  one  of  those  acute  emotional 
crises  called  a  Revival.  It  had  begun  in  the  Metho 
dist,  and  gradually  involved  the  whole  number  of 
Protestant  churches,  and  had  overflowed  into  the 
Congregational  building  as  affording  the  greatest 
seating  room;  by  the  middle  of  February  it  was  pos 
sible  to  feel  through  the  whole  community  the  ground 
swell  of  its  disturbances.  Night  after  night  the  people 
poured  in  to  it  to  be  flayed  in  spirit,  striped,  agon 
ized,  exalted  at  the  hands  of  a  practised  evangelist, 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  53 

which  they  Weed;  as  it  had  the  cachet  of  being  super- 
naturally  good  for  them,  they  liked  it  with  a  deeper, 
more  soul-stretching  enjoyment  than  the  operas,  the 
atres,  social  adventure  of  cities,  supposing  they  had 
been  at  hand. 

It  hardly  seems  possible  with  all  she  had  to  do, 
and  yet  I  think  my  mother  could  not  have  missed 
one  of  those  meetings,  going  regularly  with  Cousin 
Judd,  who  drove  in  from  the  farm  more  times  than 
you  would  have  thought  the  farm  could  have  spared 
him,  or  with  Forester,  who  had  been  converted  the 
winter  before,  though  I  think  he  must  have  regretted 
the  smaller  occasion.  Left  at  home  with  Effie  who 
was  thought  too  young  to  be  benefited  by  the  preach 
ing  and  too  old  to  be  laid  by  in  an  overcoat  on  the 
Sunday-school  benches  with  dozens  of  others,  heavy 
with  sleep  and  the  vitiated  air,  late,  when  I  had 
finished  my  arithmetic  and  was  afraid  to  go  to  bed 
in  the  empty  house,  I  would  open  the  window  a 
crack  toward  the  tall,  shutterless  windows  of  the 
church,  and  catch  the  faint  swell  of  the  hymns  and 
at  times  the  hysteric  shout  of  some  sinner  "coming 
through."  I  was  as  drawn  to  it  as  any  savage  to  the 
roll  of  the  medicine  drums. 

The  backwash  of  this  excitement  penetrated  even  to 
the  schoolroom,  as  from  time  to  time  some  awed  whis 
per  ran  of  this  and  that  one  of  our  classmates  being 
converted,  and  walking  apart  from  us  with  the  other 
saved  in  a  chastened  mystery.  And  finally  Pauline 


54  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

Allingham  and  I  talked  it  over  and  decided  to  get 
converted  too.  Pauline,  I  remember,  had  not  been 
allowed  to  attend  the  meetings  and  considered  her 
spiritual  welfare  jeopardized  in  the  prohibition.  We 
knew  by  this  time  perfectly  well  what  we  had  to  do, 
and  had  arranged  to  get  excused  from  our  respective 
rooms  —  Pauline  was  a  grade  behind  me  on  account 
of  diphtheria  the  previous  winter  —  and  to  meet  in 
the  abandoned  coal-hole  between  the  boys'  and 
girls'  basement.  Pauline,  who  had  always  an  apti 
tude  for  proselyting,  brought  another  girl  from  the 
sixth  grade,  who  was  also  under  conviction  —  we  had 
the  terms  very  pat  —  a  thin,  hatchet-faced  girl  who 
joined  the  Baptist  Church  and  afterward  married  a 
minister,  so  that  she  might  very  easily  have  reck 
oned  the  incident  at  something  like  its  supposititious 
value  in  her  life.  I  remember  that  we  knelt  down 
in  the  dusty  coal-hole  where  the  little  children  used 
to  play  I-spy,  and  prayed  by  turns  for  light,  aloud 
at  first,  and  then,  as  we  felt  the  approach  of  the  com 
pelling  mood,  silently,  as  we  waited  for  the  moment 
after  which  we  might  rather  put  it  over  our  class 
mates  on  the  strength  of  our  salvation. 

It  came,  oh,  it  came!  the  sweep  up  and  out,  the 
dizzying  lightness  —  not  very  different,  in  fact,  from 
the  breathless  rush  with  which  on  a  first  night  of 
Magda  or  Cleopatra  I  have  felt  my  part  meet  me  as  I 
crossed  between  the  wings  —  the  lift,  the  tremor  of 
passion. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  55 

"Oh,"  I  said,  "I'm  saved!  I'm  saved!  I  know 
it." 

"So  am  I,"  said  Flora  Haines.  "I  was  a  long 
time  ago,  but  I  didn't  like  to  say  anything."  And  if 
I  hadn't  just  been  converted  I  should  have  thought 
it  rather  mean  of  her.  In  the  dusk  of  the  coal-hole 
we  heard  Pauline  sniffling. 

"I  suppose  it's  because  I'm  so  much  worse  a  sin 
ner,"  she  admitted,  "but  I  just  can't  feel  it." 

"You  must  give  yourself  into  the  Lord's  hands, 
Pauline  dear."  Flora  Haines  had  heard  the  evange 
list.  I  began  to  offer  myself  passionately  in  prayer 
as  a  vicarious  atonement  for  Pauline's  shortcomings. 

"Don't  you  feel  anything?"  Flora  urged,  "not  the 
least  thing?" 

"Well . . .  sort  of  ...  something,"  Pauline  confessed. 

"Well,  of  course,  that's  it." 

"Yes,  that's  it,"  I  insisted. 

"Well,  I  suppose  it  is,"  Pauline  gave  in,  mopping 
her  eyes  with  her  handkerchief,  "but  it  isn't  the 
least  like  what  I  expected." 

We  heard  the  school  clock  strike  the  quarter  hour, 
and  got  up,  brushing  our  knees  rather  guiltily. 
Flora  Haines  and  I  were  kept  in  all  that  afternoon 
recess  for  exceeding  our  excuse,  but  Pauline  saved 
herself  by  bursting  into  tears  as  soon  as  she  reached 
her  room,  and  being  sent  home  with  a  headache. 

That  was  on  Thursday,  and  Saturday  afternoon 
we  were  all  to  meet  at  our  house  and  go  together  to  a 


56  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

great  children's  meeting,  where  we  were  expected  to 
announce  that  we  were  saved.  Pauline  was  a  little 
late.  I  was  explaining  to  Flora  Haines  that  I  was  to 
join  our  church  on  probation  on  Sunday,  but  Flora, 
being  a  Baptist,  had  been  put  off  by  her  minister 
until  the  Revival  should  be  over  and  he  could  attend 
to  all  the  baptisms  at  once.  We  naturally  expected 
something  similar  from  Pauline. 

"I  hardly  think,"  she  said,  stroking  her  muff  and 
looking  very  ladylike,  "that  I  shall  take  such  an  im 
portant  step  in  life  until  I  am  older." 

"But,"  I  objected,  "how  can  anything  be  more 
important?" 

"It's  your  soul,  Pauline!"  Flora  Haines  was 
slightly  scandalized. 

"That's  just  the  reason;  it's  so  important  my 
mother  thinks  I  ought  not  to  take  any  steps  until 
I  can  give  it  my  most  mature  judgment." 

Flora  Haines  and  I  looked  at  one  another  silently ; 
we  might  have  known  Pauline's  mother  wouldn't  let 
her  do  anything  so  common  as  get  converted. 


CHAPTER  VI 

I  WAS  duly  taken  into  the  church  on  the  following 
Sabbath,  to  the  great  relief  of  my  family,  having  for 
once  exhibited  the  normal  reaction  of  a  young  per 
son  in  my  circumstances,  and  though  I  have  laid 
much  to  the  door  of  that  institution  of  the  retarding 
of  my  development  and  the  dimming  of  the  delicate 
surface  of  happiness,  I  think  now  it  was  not  wholly 
bad  for  me.  If  I  hadn't  up  to  this  time  found  any 
way  of  being  good  by  myself,  I  was  now  provided  with 
a  criterion  of  conduct  toward  which  even  those  who 
hadn't  been  able  to  manage  it  for  themselves,  moved 
a  public  approbation.  I  have  heard  my  mother  say 
that  even  Mr.  Farley,  the  banker,  who  read  books  on 
evolution  and  was  a  Freethinker  (opprobrious  term), 
had  been  known  to  pronounce  the  church  an  excel 
lent  thing  for  women. 

The  church  left  you  in  no  doubt  about  things. 
You  attended  morning  and  evening  service;  as  soon 
as  you  were  old  enough  for  it,  which  was  before  you 
were  fit,  you  taught  in  Sunday  school;  you  waited 
on  table  at  oyster  suppers  designed  for  the  raising  of 
the  minister's  salary,  and  if  you  had  any  talent  for 
it  you  sang  in  the  choir  or  recited  things  at  the  church 
sociables.  And  when  you  were  married  and  con- 

57 


58  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

sequently  middle-aged,  you  joined  the  W.  F.  M.  S. 
and  the  Sewing  Society. 

It  was  after  the  incident  of  the  coal-hole  that  I  be 
gan  to  experience  this  easy  irreproachability,  and  to 
build  out  of  its  ready-to-hand  materials  a  sort  of 
extra  self,  from  which  afterward  to  burst  was  the 
bitter  wound  of  life.  For  my  particular  church  went 
farther  and  provided  a  chart  for  all  the  by-lanes  of 
behaviour.  "You  should  never,"  said  the  evangelist, 
whose  relish  of  the  situation  on  the  day  that  a  score 
or  so  of  us  had  renounced  the  devil  and  all  his  works, 
gave  me  a  vague  sensation  of  having  made  a  meal 
and  licked  his  lips  over  us,  "you  should  never  go 
anywhere  that  you  could  not  take  your  Saviour  with 
you,"  and  when  I  saw  Cousin  Judd  wag  at  my  mother 
and  she  smile  and  pat  her  hymn  book,  I  was  apprised 
that  we  had  come  to  the  root  of  the  whole  matter. 

I  have  wondered  since  to  how  many  young  con 
verts  in  Ohianna  that  phrase  has  been  handed  out 
and  with  what  blighting  consequences. 

For  a  Saviour  as  I  knew  Him  at  thirteen  and  a 
half,  was  a  solemn  presence  that  ran  in  your  mind 
with  the  bleakness  of  plain,  whitewashed  walls  and 
hard  benches  and  a  general  hush,  a  vague  sensation 
of  your  chest  being  too  tight  for  you,  and  a  little  of 
the  feeling  you  had  when  you  had  gone  to  call  at  the 
Allinghams  and  had  forgotten  to  wipe  your  feet;  and 
it  was  manifest  if  you  took  that  incubus  everywhere 
you  went  you  wouldn't  have  any  fun. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  59 

It  was  fortunate  at  that  time  that  it  was  not  the 
desire  for  entertainment  that  moved  me  so  much  as 
the  need  of  my  youth  to  serve;  the  unparented  hun 
ger  for  authority.  But  with  the  pressure  of  that 
environment,  if  there  had  been  anybody  with  the  wit 
to  see  where  my  Gift  lay,  what  anybody  could  have 
done  about  it  it  is  difficult  to  say.  When  all  that 
Taylorville  afforded  of  the  proper  food  of  Gift,  bright 
ness,  music,  and  the  dance,  was  of  so  forlorn  a  quality, 
it  has  been  a  question  if  I  do  not  owe  the  church  some 
thanks  for  cutting  out  the  possible  cheapening  of 
taste  and  the  satisfaction  of  ill-regulated  applause 
—  that  is,  if  Gift  can  be  hurt  at  all  by  what  hap 
pens  to  the  possessor.  It  can  be  cramped  and  en 
feebled  in  expression,  rendered  tormenting  in  its 
passage  and  futile  to  the  recipient,  but  to  whom  it 
comes  its  supernal  quality  rises  forever  beyond  all 
attainder. 

What  happened  to  the  actress  during  all  the  time 
I  was  undertaken  by  the  church  to  be  made  into  the 
sort  of  woman  serviceable  to  Taylorville,  was  incon 
siderable;  what  grew  out  of  it  for  Olivia  was  no  small 
matter,  and  much  of  it  I  lay  without  bitterness  to 
Cousin  Judd,  who,  from  having  got  himself  named 
adviser  in  my  father's  will,  was  in  a  position  to  affect 
my  life  to  the  worse. 

And  yet,  in  so  far  as  I  am  not  an  unprecedented 
sport  on  the  family  tree,  I  had  more  in  common  with 
this  shrewd-dealing,  loud-praying,  twice-removed 


60  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

soldier  cousin  than  with  any  of  my  kin,  though  I 
should  hardly  say  as  much  to  him,  for  he  has  never 
been  in  a  theatre,  and  if  he  still  considers  me  a  hope 
ful  subject  for  prayer  it  is  because  his  Christian  duty 
rises  superior  to  his  conviction. 

He  is  pricked  out  in  my  earlier  recollections  by  the 
difficulty  he  seems  to  have  had  in  effecting  a  com 
promise  between  the  traditional  distrustfulness  of 
the  Ohianna  farmer  toward  the  Powers  in  general, 
and  particularly  of  the  weather,  and  his  obligation 
of  Christian  Joy;  and  for  a  curious  effect  of  not  be 
longing  to  his  wife,  a  large,  uninteresting  woman 
with  a  sense  of  her  own  merit  which  she  never  suc 
ceeded  in  imposing  on  anybody  but  Cousin  Judd. 
She  had  a  keen  appreciation  of  worldly  values  which 
led  her  always  to  select  the  best  material  for  her 
clothes,  and  another  feeling  of  their  expensiveness 
which  resulted  in  her  being  always  a  little  belated 
in  the  styles.  She  approved  of  religion,  though  not 
active  in  it,  and  in  twenty  years  she  and  Cousin  Judd 
had  arrived  at  a  series  of  compromises  and  excuses 
which  enabled  her  to  appear  at  church  one  Sunday 
in  five  and  still  keep  up  the  interest  of  the  clergyman 
and  congregation  as  to  why  she  didn't  come  the 
other  four. 

Whenever  the  days  were  short  or  the  roads  too 
heavy,  Cousin  Judd  would  put  up  over  night  at  our 
house,  and  I  remember  how  my  mother  would  al 
ways  be  able  to  say,  looking  about  the  empty  demo- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  61 

crat  wagon  as  though  she  expected  her  in  ambush 
somewhere : 

"And  you  didn't  bring  Lydia?"  and  Cousin  Judd 
being  able  to  reply  to  it  as  if  it  were  something  he 
had  expected  up  till  the  last  moment,  and  been  keenly 
disappointed: 

"Well,  no,  Liddy  ain't  feeling  quite  up  to  it," 
which  my  mother  received  without  skepticism.  After 
this  they  were  free  to  talk  of  other  things. 

What  there  was  between  Cousin  Judd  and  me, 
with  due  allowance  for  the  years,  was  the  spark,  the 
touch-and-go  of  vitality  that  rose  in  me  to  a  hundred 
beckonings  of  running  flood  and  waving  boughs  — 
music  and  movement;  and  only  the  moral  enthusi 
asms  of  war  and  religion  raised  through  his  heavy 
farmer  stuff.  We  should  have  loved  one  another 
had  we  known  how;  as  it  was,  all  our  intercourse  was 
marked  on  his  part  by  the  gracelessness  of  rusticity, 
and  by  the  impertinence  of  adolescence  on  mine.  I 
used  regularly  to  receive  his  pious  admonitions  with 
what,  for  a  Taylorville  child,  was  flippancy;  never 
theless  there  were  occasions  when  we  had  set  off  of 
summer  Sunday  mornings  together  to  early  class, 
when  the  church  was  cool  and  dim  and  the  smell  of 
the  honey  locusts  came  in  through  the  window,  that 
I  caught  the  thrill  that  ran  from  the  pounding  of  his 
fist  where  he  prayed  at  the  other  end  of  the  long 
bench;  and  there  was  a  kind  of  blessedness  shed  from 
him  as  with  closed  eyes  and  lifted  chin  he  swung 


62  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

from  peak  to  peak  of  the  splendid  measure  of  "How 
Firm  a  Foundation,"  that  I  garnered  up  and  hugged 
to  myself  in  place  of  Art  and  the  Joy  of  Living.  All 
of  which  was  very  good  for  me  and  might  have  an 
swered  if  it  had  not  come  into  Cousin  Judd's  head 
that  he  ought  to  overlook  my  reading. 

By  this  time  I  had  worked  through  all  my  father's 
books  and  was  ready  to  satisfy  the  itch  of  imagina 
tion  even  with  the  vicious  inaccuracies  of  what  was 
called  Christian  literature.  The  trouble  all  came  of 
course  of  my  not  understanding  the  nature  of  a  lie. 
Not  that  I  couldn't  tell  a  downright  fib  if  I  had  to, 
or  haven't  on  occasion,  but  a  lie  is  to  me  just  as  silly 
a  performance  when  it  is  about  marriage  or  work  as 
about  the  law  of  gravitation,  and  when  it  is  presented 
to  me  in  the  form  of  human  behaviour  it  makes  me 
sick,  like  the  smell  of  tuberoses  in  a  close  room;  and 
I  failed  utterly  to  realize  then  that  there  are  a  great 
many  people  capable  of  living  sincerely  and  at  the 
same  time  blandly  misrepresenting  the  facts  of  life  in 
the  interests  of  what  is  called  morality.  I  do  not 
think  it  probable  that  Cousin  Judd  accepted  for  him 
self  the  rule  of  behaviour  prescribed  by  the  books  he 
recommended  —  I  shall  not  tell  you  what  they  were, 
but  if  there  are  any  Sunday-school  libraries  in  Ohi- 
anna  you  will  find  them  on  the  shelves  —  but  I  know 
that  he  and  my  mother  esteemed  them  excellent  for 
the  young. 

So  far  as  they  thought  of  it  at  all,  they  believed  that 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  63 

in  surrounding  me  with  intimations  of  a  life  in  which 
there  was  nothing  more  important  than  settling  with 
Deity  the  minor  details  of  living,  and  especially  how 
much  you  would  pay  to  His  establishment,  they  had 
done  their  utmost  to  provide  me  with  a  life  in  which 
nothing  more  important  could  happen.  If  you  were 
careful  about  reading  the  Bible  and  doing  good  to 
people  —  that  is,  persuading  them  to  go  to  church 
and  to  leave  off  swearing  —  all  the  more  serious  de 
tails  such  as  making  a  living,  marrying  and  having 
children  would  take  care  of  themselves;  and  the 
trouble  was,  as  I  have  said,  that  I  believed  it.  And 
that  was  how  I  found  myself  farthest  from  Art  and 
Life  at  the  time  when  I  found  myself  a  young  lady. 

I  had  to  make  this  discovery  for  myself,  for  there 
were  no  social  occasions  in  Taylorville  to  give  a  term 
to  your  advent  into  the  grown-up  world,  though 
there  was  a  definite  privilege  which  marked  your 
achievement  of  it.  There  was  a  period  prior  to  this 
in  which  you  bumped  against  things  you  were  too 
old  for,  and  carromed  to  the  things  for  which  you 
were  quite  too  young.  Then  about  the  end  of  your 
high-school  term  you  had  done  with  hair  ribbons  and 
begun  to  have  company  on  your  own  account,  and 
the  sort  of  things  began  to  happen  which  marked 
the  point  beyond  which  if  you  fell  upon  disaster  it 
was  your  own  fault.  They  happened  to  me.  < 

By  dint  of  my  doing  her  compositions  and  of  her 
doing  my  arithmetic,  Pauline  Allingham  and  I  had 


64  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

managed  to  keep  together  all  through  the  high 
school,  and  it  was  in  our  last  year,  when  we  used  to 
put  in  the  long  end  of  the  afternoons  at  Pauline's, 
playing  croquet,  that  I  first  took  notice  of  Tommy 
Bettersworth.  The  Bettersworth  yard  abutted  on 
the  Allingham's  for  the  space  of  one  woodshed  and  a 
horse-chestnut  tree,  and  it  was  along  in  October  that 
I  began  to  be  aware  that  it  was  not  altogether  the 
view  of  the  garden  that  kept  Tommy  on  the  wood 
shed  or  in  the  chestnut  tree  the  greater  part  of  the 
afternoon.  It  may  be  that  the  adventure  with 
Charlie  Gower  had  sharpened  my  perception,  at  any 
rate  it  had  aroused  my  discretion;  I  was  carefully 
oblivious  to  the  proximity  of  Tommy  Bettersworth. 
But  there  came  a  day  when  Pauline  was  not,  when 
she  wanted  to  tell  me  something  about  Flora  Haines 
which  she  was  afraid  he  might  overhear. 

"Come  around  to  the  summer-house,"  she  said, 
"Tommy's  always  hanging  about;  I  can't  think  what 
makes  him." 

"Always?"  I  suggested. 

"Why,  you  know  yourself  he  was  there  last  Satur 
day,  and  Thursday  when  we  .  .  .  : 

"Is  he  there  when  you  and  Flora  are  there,  or 
only  ..." 

"Oh!"  Pauline  gave  a  gasp,  "No Oh,  I 

never  thought  .  .  .  Olive  ...  I  do  believe  .  .  . 
that's  it!" 

"Well,  what?" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  65 

"It's  you,  Olive,"  solemnly.  "It  must  be 
that  ...  he  really  is  .  .  ."  Pauline's  reading  in 
cluded  more  romance  than  mine. 

"Well,  he  can't  say  I  gave  him  any  encourage 
ment." 

"Oh,  of  course  not,  darling,"  Pauline  was  sym 
pathetic.  "You  couldn't  .  .  .  it  is  so  interesting. 
What  would  the  girls  say?" 

"Pauline,  if  you  ever     ..." 

"Truly,  I  never  will  ....    But  just  think!" 

But  we  reckoned  without  Alfred  Allingham. 
Alfred  was  not  a  nice  boy  at  that  age;  he  had  come 
the  way  of  curled  darlings  to  be  a  sly,  tale-bearing, 
offensive  little  cad,  and  the  next  Saturday,  when 
Pauline  turned  him  off  the  croquet  ground  for  rib 
aldry,  he  went  as  far  as  the  rose  border  and  jeered 
back  at  us. 

"I  know  why  you  don't  want  me,"  he  mocked; 
"so's  I  can't  see  Olive  and  Tommy  Bettersworth 
makin'  eyes."  He  executed  a  jig  to  the  tune  of 

"Olive's  mad  and  I  am  glad, 
And  I  know  what'll  please  her " 

At  this  juncture  the  wrist  and  hand  of  Tommy  Bet 
tersworth  appeared  over  the  partition  fence  armed 
with  horse-chestnuts  which  thudded  with  precision 
on  the  offensive  person  of  Alfred  Allingham.  Pau 
line  and  I  escaped  to  the  summer-house.  I  thought 


66  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

I  was  going  to  cry  until  I  found  I  was  giggling,  at 
which  I  was  so  mortified  that  I  did  cry. 

"He'll  tell  everybody  in  school,"  I  protested. 

"What  do  you  care?"  soothed  Pauline,  "besides, 
you  have  to  be  teased  about  somebody,  you  know, 
and  have  somebody  to  choose  you  when  they  play 
clap  in  and  clap  out.  You  just  have  to.  Look  at 
me."  Pauline  had  been  carrying  on  the  discreetest 
of  flirtations  with  Henry  Glave  for  some  months. 
"Tommy  Bettersworth  is  a  nice  boy,  and  besides, 
dear,  we'll  have  so  much  more  in  common." 

Pauline  was  right.  Unless  you  had  somebody  to 
be  teased  about  you  were  really  not  in  things.  I  was 
furiously  embarrassed  by  it,  but  I  was  resigned. 
Tommy  sent  me  two  notes  that  winter  and  a  silk 
handkerchief  for  Christmas  which  I  pretended  was 
from  Pauline.  I  am  not  going  to  be  blamed  for  this. 
It  was  at  least  a  month  earlier  that  I  had  observed 
Tommy  Bettersworth's  inability  to  get  away  from 
Nile's  corner  on  his  way  home  from  school  until  I  had 
passed  there  on  mine.  It  struck  me  as  a  very  inter 
esting  trait  of  masculine  character;  I  would  have 
liked  to  talk  it  over  with  my  mother  on  the  plane  of 
human  interest;  it  seemed  possible  she  might  have 
noted  similar  eccentricities.  I  remember  I  worked 
around  to  it  Saturday  morning  when  I  was  helping 
her  to  darn  the  tablecloths.  My  mother  was  not 
unprepared;  she  did  her  duty  by  me  as  it  was  con 
ceived  in  Taylorville,  and  did  it  promptly. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  67 

You  are  too  young  to  be  thinking  about  the  boys," 
she  said.  "I  don't  want  to  hear  you  talking  about 
such  things  until  the  time  comes." 

This  was  so  much  in  line  with  what  was  expected 
of  parents,  that  I  blinked  the  obvious  retort  that  the 
time  for  talking  about  such  things  was  when  they 
began  to  happen,  and  went  on  with  the  tablecloths. 
But  I  couldn't  tell  her  about  the  handkerchief  after 
that.  It  would  have  been  positively  unmaidenly. 
And  after  he  had  sent  me  a  magnificent  paper  lace 
valentine,  I  distinctly  encouraged  Tommy  Betters- 
worth. 

This  being  the  case,  I  do  not  know  just  how  it  began 
to  be  conveyed  to  me,  as  in  the  lengthening  evenings 
of  spring.  Tommy  took  to  church-going,  that  his 
hands  were  coarse  and  his  ears  too  prominent,  and 
as  I  confided  solemnly  to  Pauline,  though  I  had  the 
greatest  respect  for  his  character,  I  simply  couldn't 
bear  to  have  him  about.  This  was  the  more  singu 
lar  since  the  church-going  was  the  visible  sign  of  the 
good  influence  that,  according  to  the  books,  I  was 
exercising;  and  though  Tommy  was  as  nearly  inar 
ticulate  as  was  natural,  I  was  in  no  doubt  on  whose 
account  this  new  start  proceeded.  If  I  had  not  dis 
liked  Tommy  very  much  at  this  period,  why  should 
I  have  taken  to  tucking  myself  between  Forester 
and  Effie  on  the  way  home,  embarrassedly  aware  of 
Tommy,  whose  way  did  not  lie  in  our  direction, 
scuffling  along  with  the  Lawrences  on  the  other 


68  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

side  of  the  street?  I  seem  to  remember  some  rather 
heroic  attempts  on  Tommy's  part  to  account  for  his 
presence  there  on  the  ground  of  wanting  to  speak 
privately  to  Forester,  certain  shouts  and  sallies 
toward  which  my  brother  displayed  a  derisive  con 
sciousness  of  their  not  being  pertinent  to  the  oc 
casion. 

I  have  often  wondered  how  much  of  these  tenta 
tive  ventures  toward  an  altered  relation  were  ob 
served  by  our  elders;  not  much,  I  should  think.  At 
any  rate  no  mollifying  word  drifted  down  from  their 
heights  of  experience  to  our  shallows  of  self-con 
sciousness. 

My  mother  adhered  to  her  notion  of  my  not  being 
at  an  age  for  "such  things,"  borne  out,  I  believe,  by 
the  consensus  of  paternal  opinion  that  she  might  too 
easily  "put  notions"  in  my  head;  not  inquiring  what 
notions  might  by  the  natural  process  of  living  be  al 
ready  there.  Perhaps  they  were  not  altogether 
wrong  in  this,  so  delicate  is  the  process  of  sex  develop 
ment  that  nature  herself  obscures  the  processes. 
To  this  day  I  do  not  know  how  much  my  taking 
suddenly  to  going  home  by  a  short  cut  with  Belle 
Endsleigh  was  embarrassment,  and  how  much  a  dis 
creet  feminine  awareness  that  in  my  absence  Tommy 
would  better  manage  to  make  the  family  take  his 
walking  with  them  as  a  matter  of  course,  but  I  re 
member  that  I  cried  when  my  mother,  who  did  not 
approve  of  Belle  Endsleigh,  scolded  me.  And  then 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  69 

quite  suddenly  came  the  click  and  the  loosened  ten 
sion  of  the  readjustment. 

Along  about  Easter  Alfred  Allingham  told  Pau 
line  that  Tommy  had  thrashed  Charlie  Gower,  and 
though  it  was  supposed  to  be  the  strictest  secret,  it 
was  because  Charlie  had  teased  him  about  me. 
Pauline  was  rather  scandalized  by  my  insistence  that 
Charlie  wouldn't  have  done  it  if  Tommy  hadn't 
rather  conspicuously  brought  it  on  himself. 

"I  call  it  truly  noble  of  him  .  .  .  like  a  knight." 
Pauline  could  always  throw  the  glamour  of  her  read 
ing  around  the  immediate  circumstance.  "At  any 
rate,  after  this  you  can't  do  anything  less  than  treat 
him  politely,"  she  urged. 

Whether  it  would  have  made  any  difference  in  my 
attitude  or  not,  it  did  in  Tommy's.  I  saw  that  when 
he  came  out  of  the  church  with  us  next  Sunday. 
There  was  a  certain  aggressive  maleness  in  the  way 
he  strode  beside  me,  that  there  was  no  mistaking.  I 
looked  about  rather  feebly  for  Belle. 

"I  don't  see  her  anywhere,"  Tommy  assured  me, 
"besides,  we  don't  want  her."  As  I  could  see 
Tommy  in  the  light  that  streamed  from  the  church 
windows,  it  occurred  to  me  that  if  he  was  not  good- 
looking  he  certainly  looked  good,  and  he  had  a 
moustache  coming. 

Forester,  who  was  going  through  a  phase  himself, 
had  gone  home  with  Amy  Lawrence;  Effie  lagged 
behind  with  mother,  talking  to  Mrs.  Endsleigh  about 


70  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  prospect  of  the  Sewing  Society  raising  the  money 
for  repainting  the  parsonage.  Looking  back  to  see 
what  had  become  of  them  I  tripped  on  the  board 
walk. 

"If  you  would  take  my  arm"  .  .  .  suggested 
Tommy.  I  was  aware  of  the  sleeve  of  his  coat 
under  my  fingers. 

The  next  turn  took  us  out  of  sound  of  the  voices; 
the  street  lamps  flared  far  apart  in  the  long,  quiet 
avenue.  The  shed  pods  of  the  maples  slipped  and 
popped  under  us  with  the  sweet  smell  of  the  sap. 

"How  did  you  like  the  sermon?"  Tommy  wished 
to  know.  What  I  had  to  say  of  it  was  probably  not 
very  much  to  the  point.  No  one  overtook  us  as  we 
walked.  There  was  a  sense  of  tremendous  occasions 
in  the  air,  of  things  accomplished.  I  had  established 
the  privilege.  I  was  walking  home  from  church  with 
a  young  man.  I  was  a  young  lady. 


CHAPTER  VII 

As  OFTEN  as  I  think  of  Olivia  Lattimore  growing 
up,  I  have  wondered  if  there  was  really  no  evidence 
of  dramatic  talent  about,  or  simply  no  one  able  to 
observe  it.  There  was  no  theatre  at  Taylorville, 
and  when  from  time  to  time  third-rate  stock  com 
panies  performed  indifferent  plays  at  the  Town  Hall, 
Forrie  and  Effie  and  I  heard  nothing  of  them  except 
that  they  were  presumably  wicked. 

Occasionally  there  were  amateur  performances  in 
which,  when  I  had  won  a  grudging  consent  to  take 
part,  I  failed  to  distinguish  myself.  Effie  had  a  very 
amusing  trick  of  mimicry,  and  if  you  had  heard  her 
recite  "Curfew  Shall  Not  Ring  To-night,"  you  would 
have  thought  that  the  Gift  on  its  way  from  whatever 
high  and  unknowable  source,  in  passing  her  had 
lighted  haphazard  on  the  most  unlikely  instrument. 
I  was  not  even  clever  at  my  books  except  by  starts 
and  flashes. 

I  graduated  at  the  high  school  with  Pauline,  and 
afterward  we  had  two  years  together  at  Montecito. 
This  was  the  next  town  to  Taylorville,  and  its  bitter 
rival.  Montecito  had  a  Young  Ladies'  Seminary,  a 
Business  College,  and  the  State  Institution  for  the 
Blind,  for  which  Taylorville  so  little  forgave  it  that 

71 


72  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  new  railroad  was  persuaded  to  leave  Montecito 
four  miles  to  the  right  and  make  its  junction  with 
the  L.  and  C.  at  Taylorville.  This  carried  the  farmer 
shipping  away  from  Montecito,  but  the  victory 
was  not  altogether  scathless;  young  ladies  were  still 
obliged  to  go  to  the  seminary,  and  it  enabled 
Montecito  to  put  on  the  air  of  having  retired  from 
the  vulgar  competition  of  trade  and  become  the 
Athens  of  the  West. 

Pauline  and  I  went  over  to  school  on  Mondays 
and  home  on  Fridays.  The  course  of  study  was  for 
three  years,  but  because  there  was  Effie  to  think  of 
and  my  mother's  means  were  limited,  I  had  only  two, 
and  was  never  able  to  catch  up  with  Pauline  by  the 
length  of  that  extra  year.  She  was  always  holding 
it  out  against  me  in  extenuation  and  excuse;  when 
she  tried  to  account  for  my  marriage  having  turned 
out  so  badly  on  the  ground  of  my  not  having  had 
Advantages,  I  knew  she  was  thinking  of  Montecito. 
She  thinks  of  it  still,  I  imagine,  to  condone  as  she 
does,  I  am  sure,  with  an  adorable  womanliness,  what 
in  my  conduct  she  no  longer  feels  able  to  counte 
nance.  And  yet  I  hardly  know  what  I  might  have 
drawn  from  that  third  year  more  than  I  took  away 
from  the  other  two,  which  was,  besides  the  regular 
course  of  study,  an  acquaintance  with  a  style  of 
furnishings  not  all  gilt  wall  paper  and  plush  brocade, 
and  a  renewed  taste  for  good  reading.  They  made 
such  a  point  of  good  reading  at  the  seminary  that  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  73 

have  always  thought  it  a  pity  they  could  not  go  a 
little  farther  and  make  a  practice  of  it. 

The  difficulty  with  most  of  our  reading  was  that 
it  had  no  relativity  to  the  processes  of  life  in  Ohi- 
anna;  we  had  things  as  far  removed  from  it  as  Dante 
and  Euripides,  things  no  nearer  than  "The  Scarlet 
Letter"  and  "David  Copper-field,"  from  which  to 
draw  for  the  exigencies  of  Taylorville  was  to  cause 
my  mother  to  wonder,  with  tears  in  her  eyes,  why  in 
the  world  I  couldn't  be  like  other  people.  I  read;  I 
gorged,  in  fact,  on  the  best  books,  but  I  found  it  more 
convenient  to  go  on  living  by  the  shallow  priggish- 
ness  of  Cousin  Judd's  selection.  All  that  splendid 
stream  poured  in  upon  me  and  sank  and  lost  itself 
in  the  shifty  undercurrent  that  made  still,  by  times, 
distracting  eddies  on  the  surface  of  adolescence. 

But  whatever  was  missed  or  misunderstood  of  its 
evidences,  the  Gift  worked  at  the  bottom,  throve 
like  a  sea  anemone  under  the  shallows  of  girlishness, 
and,  nourished  by  unsuspected  means,  was  the  source 
no  doubt  of  the  live  resistance  I  opposed  to  all  that 
grew  out  of  Forester's  making  a  vocation  of  being  a 
good  son.  I  do  not  know  yet  how  to  deal  with  suf 
ficient  tenderness  and  without  exasperation  with  the 
disposition  of  widowed  women,  bred  to  dependence, 
to  build  out  of  their  sons  the  shape  of  a  man  proper 
to  be  leaned  upon.  It  is  so  justified  in  sentiment,  so 
pretty  to  see  in  its  immediate  phases,  that  though  my 
mother  was  young  and  attractive  enough  to  have 


74  A  WOMAN  OP  GENIUS 

married  again,  it  was  difficult  not  to  concur  in  her 
making  a  virtue,  a  glorification  of  living  entirely  in 
her  boy.  I  seem  to  remember  a  time  before  Forrie 
was  intrigued  by  the  general  appreciation,  when  it 
required  some  coercion  to  present  him  always  in  the 
character  of  the  most  dutiful  son.  He  hadn't,  for 
instance,  invariably  fancied  himself  setting  out  for 
prayer  meeting  with  my  mother's  hymn  book  and 
umbrella,  but  the  second  summer  after  my  father 
died, 'when  he  had  worked  on  Cousin  Judd's  farm 
and  brought  home  his  wages,  found  him  completely 
implicated.  We  were  really  not  so  poor  there  was 
any  occasion  for  this,  but  mother  was  so  delighted 
with  the  idea  of  a  provider,  and  Forester  was  so 
pleased  with  the  picture  of  himself  in  that  capacity, 
that  it  was  all,  no  doubt,  very  good  for  him. 

He  always  did  bring  home  his  wages  after  that, 
which  led  to  his  being  consulted  about  meals,  and 
the  new  curtains  for  the  dining-room,  and  to  being 
met  in  the  evening  as  though  all  the  house  had  been 
primed  for  his  return,  and  merely  gone  on  in  that 
expectation  while  he  was  away.  Effie,  I  know,  had 
no  difficulty  in  accepting  him  as  the  excuse  for  any 
amount  of  household  ritual,  making  a  fuss  about  his 
birthdays  and  trying  on  her  new  clothes  for  his  ap 
proval,  but  Effie  was  five  years  younger  than  Forester 
and  I  was  only  twenty-two  months.  It  was  more,  I 
think,  than  our  community  in  the  gaucheries  and 
hesitancies  of  youth  that  disinclined  me  to  take  seri- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  75 

ously  my  brother's  opinions  on  window  curtains  and 
to  sniff  at  my  mother's  affectionate  pretence  of  his 
being  the  head  of  the  family.  At  times  when  I  felt 
this  going  on  in  our  house,  there  rose  up  like  a  wisp 
of  fog  between  me  and  the  glittering  promise  of  the 
future,  a  kind  of  horror  of  the  destiny  of  women;  to 
defer  and  adjust,  to  maintain  the  attitude  of  acqui 
escence  toward  opinions  and  capabilities  that  had 
nothing  more  to  recommend  them  than  merely  that 
they  were  a  man's!  I  could  be  abased,  I  should  be 
delighted  to  be  imposed  upon,  but  if  I  paid  out  self- 
immolation  I  wanted  something  for  my  money,  and 
I  didn't  consider  I  was  getting  it  with  my  brother 
for  whom  I  smuggled  notes  and  copied  composi 
tions. 

It  never  occurred  to  my  mother,  until  it  came  to 
the  concrete  question  of  spending-money,  that  there 
was  anything  more  than  a  kind  of  natural  perverse- 
ness  in  my  attitude,  which  only  served  to  throw  into 
relief  the  satisfactoriness  of  her  relations  to  her  son. 
Forester,  it  appeared,  was  to  have  an  allowance,  and 
I  wanted  one  too. 

"But  what,"  said  my  mother,  tolerantly,  for  she 
had  not  yet  thought  of  granting  it,  "would  you  do 
with  an  allowance?" 

"Whatever  Forester  does." 

"But  Forester,"  my  mother  explained,  waving  the 
stocking  she  had  stretched  upon  her  hand,  "is  a 
boy."  I  expostulated. 


76  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"What  has  that  got  to  do  with  it?" 

"Olivia!"  The  ridiculousness  of  having  such  a 
question  addressed  to  her  brought  a  smile  to  my 
mother's  lips,  which  hung  fixed  there  as  I  saw  her 
mind  back  away  suddenly  in  fear  that  I  was  really 
going  to  insist  on  knowing  what  that  had  to  do 
with  it. 

"I  give  you  twenty-five  cents  a  week  for  church 
money,"  she  parried  weakly. 

"That's  what  you  think  I  ought  to  give.  I  want 
an  allowance,  and  then  I  can  deny  myself  and  give 
what  I  like." 

"Forester  earns  his,"  said  my  mother;  she  hadn't 
of  course  meant  the  discussion  to  get  on  to  a  basis 
of  reasonableness. 

"Well,"  I  threatened,  "I'll  earn  mine." 

That  was  really  what  did  the  business  in  the  end. 
All  the  boys  in  Taylorville  worked  as  soon  as  they 
were  old  enough,  but  it  was  the  last  resort  of  poverty 
that  girls  should  be  put  to  wages.  Before  that  pos 
sibility  my  mother  retreated  into  amused  indulgence. 
She  paid  me  my  allowance,  appreciably  less  than  my 
brother's,  on  the  first  of  the  month,  with  the  air  of 
concurring  in  a  joke,  which  I  think  now  must  have 
covered  some  vague  hurt  at  my  want  of  sympathy 
with  the  beautiful  fiction  of  Forester's  growing  up  to 
take  my  father's  place  with  her.  They  had  achieved 
by  the  time  Forester  was  twenty,  what  passed  for 
perfect  confidence  between  them,  though  it  was  at 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  77 

the  cost  of  Forester's  living  shallowly  or  not  at  all 
in  the  courts  of  boyhood  which  my  mother  was  un 
able  to  reenter,  and  her  voluntary  withdrawal  from 
varieties  of  experience  from  which  his  youth  pre 
vented  him.  My  mother  always  thought  it  was  made 
up  to  her  in  affection;  what  came  out  of  it  for  Fores 
ter  is  still  on  the  knees  of  the  gods. 

I  began  to  say  how  it  was  that  the  Gift  took  care 
of  itself  while  Forester  was  engrossing  the  family 
attention.  He  had  had  a  year  at  the  business  col 
lege  in  Montecito,  which  was  considered  quite  suf 
ficient,  and  rather  more,  in  fact,  than  his  accepted 
vocation  as  the  support  of  his  mother  seemed  to  call 
for.  Any  question  that  might  naturally  come  up  of 
a  profession  for  him,  seemed  to  have  been  quashed 
beforehand  by  the  general  notion  of  an  immediate 
salary  as  the  means  to  that  end.  I  do  not  recall  a 
voice  lifted  on  behalf  of  a  life  of  his  own.  He  had 
worked  up  from  driving  the  delivery  wagon  in 
vacations  to  being  dry  goods  clerk  at  the  Coopera 
tive,  where  his  affability  and  easy  familiarity  with 
the  requirements  of  women,  made  him  immensely 
popular.  Everybody  liked  to  trade  with  Forester 
because  he  took  such  pains  in  matching  things,  and 
he  was  such  a  good  boy  to  his  mother.  He  paid  the 
largest  portion  of  his  salary  for  his  board,  and  took 
Effie,  who  adored  him,  about  with  him.  I  don't 
mean  to  say  that  he  was  not  also  good  friends  with 
Olivia,  or  that  there  was  anything  which  prevented 


78  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

my  doing  my  best  with  the  three  chocolate  layer 
cakes  and  the  angel's  food  I  made  for  his  party  on 
his  twenty-first  birthday. 

The  real  unpleasantness  on  that  occasion  came 
of  my  mother's  notion  of  distinguishing  it  among 
all  other  birthdays  by  paying  over  to  Forester 
a  third  of  the  not  very  considerable  sum  left  by  my 
father,  derived  chiefly  from  his  back  pay  as  an 
officer,  which  she  had  always  held  as  particularly  set 
aside  for  us  children.  It  was  owing  perhaps  to  a 
form  of  secretiveness  that  in  unprotected  woman 
does  duty  for  caution,  that  Effie  and  I  had  scarcely 
heard  of  this  sum  until  it  was  flourished  before  us  on 
the  day  before  the  birthday,  much  as  if  it  had  been 
my  father's  sword,  supposing  the  occasion  to  have 
required  it  being  girded  on  his  son. 

Forester  was  to  have  a  third  of  that  money  in  the 
form  of  a  check  under  his  plate  on  the  morning  of  his 
birthday.  Effie  and  I  did  full  justice  to  the  mag 
nificence  of  the  proposal.  I  was  beating  the  whites 
of  thirteen  eggs  by  Pauline's  recipe  for  angel  food  — 
mine  called  for  only  eleven  —  and  Effie  was  rubbing 
up  Mrs.  Endsleigh's  spoons,  which  had  been  borrowed 
for  the  party. 

I  was  always  happier  in  the  kitchen  than  in  any 
room  of  the  house,  with  its  plain  tinted  walls,  the 
plain  painted  woodwork  (the  parlour  was  hideously 
"grained"),  and  the  red  of  Effie's  geraniums  at  the 
window  ledge.  The  stir  of  domesticity,  all  this  talk 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  79 

of  my  father,  intrigued  me  for  the  moment  into  the 
sense  of  being  a  valued  and  intrinsic  part  of  the 
family. 

"His  father  would  have  wanted  Forester  to  have 
that  money,"  said  my  mother,  "now  that  he's  of 
age." 

"And  when,"  I  questioned,  raised  by  the  mention 
of  thirds  to  the  joyous  inclusion,  "are  Effie  and  I  to 
have  ours?" 

"Oh,"  my  mother's  interest  waned,  "when  you 
are  married,  perhaps." 

It  had  grown  in  my  mind  as  I  spoke,  that  I  had 
been  of  age  now  more  than  a  year  and  nothing  had 
come  of  it.  The  suggestion  that  my  father  could 
have  taken  a  less  active  interest  in  the  event  on  my 
behalf,  pressed  upon  a  dying  sensibility;  I  resented 
his  being  so  committed  to  this  posthumous  slight 
and  meant  to  defend  him  from  it. 

"He'd  have  wanted  me  to  have  mine  on  my  birth 
day,  the  same  as  Forester,"  I  insisted. 

"Oh,  Olivia!"  My  mother's  tone  intimated  an 
noyance  at  my  claim  to  being  supported  by  my  father 
in  my  absurdities,  but  her  good  humour  was  proof 
against  it.  "Girls  have  theirs  when  they  are  mar 
ried,"  she  soothed. 

I  held  up  the  platter  and  whisked  the  stiff  froth 
with  the  air  of  doing  these  things  very  dexterously; 
I  wasn't  going  to  admit  by  taking  it  seriously,  that 
my  brother's  coming  of  age  was  any  more  important 


80  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

than  mine,  but  I  spare  you  the  flippancies  by  which 
I  covered  the  hurt  of  realizing  that  to  everybody  ex 
cept  myself,  it  was. 

"It  is  so  like  you,  Olivia,"  said  my  mother,  with 
tears  in  her  eyes,  "to  want  to  spoil  everything." 
What  I  had  really  spoiled  was  the  free  exercise  of 
partiality  by  which  she  was  enabled  to  distinguish 
Forester  over  her  other  children,  according  to  her 
sense  of  his  deserts;  and,  besides,  what  in  the  world 
would  the  child  do  with  all  that  money? 

"The  same  thing  that  Forester  does,"  I  main 
tained,  and  then  quickly  to  forestall  another  objec 
tion  which  I  saw  rising  in  her  face.  "If  you  were 
old  enough  to  be  married  at  nineteen,  I  guess  I  am 
old  enough  to  be  trusted  with  a  few  hundred  dol 
lars." 

But  there  I  had  struck  again  on  the  structure  of 
tradition  that  kept  Taylorville  from  direct  contact 
with  the  issues  of  life;  anybody  was  old  enough  to 
be  married  at  eighteen,  but  money  was  a  serious 
matter.  Whenever  I  said  things  like  that  I  could 
see  my  mother  waver  between  a  shocked  wonder  at 
having  produced  such  unnaturalness,  and  the  fear 
that  somebody  might  overhear  us.  And  I  didn't 
know  myself  what  I  wanted  with  that  money,  except 
that  I  craved  the  sense  of  being  important  that  went 
with  the  possession  of  it.  And  of  course  now  that 
I  had  been  refused  it  on  the  ground  of  sex,  it  was 
part  of  the  general  resistance  that  I  opposed  to 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  81 

things  as  they  were,  to  have  it  on  principle.  Just 
when  I  had  mother  almost  convinced  that  she  ought 
to  give  it  to  me,  she  made  it  nearly  impossible  for 
me  to  accept,  by  asking  Forester  what  she  ought  to 
do  about  it.  When  I  had  demanded  it  as  the  evi 
dence  of  my  taking  rank  with  my  brother  as  a  per 
sonage,  it  was  insufferable  that  it  should  come  to  me 
as  a  concession  of  his  amiability. 

What  I  really  wanted  of  course  was  to  have  it  put 
under  my  plate  with  an  affectionate  speech  about  its 
being  the  legacy  of  a  soldier  and  the  witness  of  his 
integrity,  coupled  with  the  hope  that  I  would  spend 
it  in  a  manner  to  give  pleasure  to  my  dear  father, 
who  was  no  doubt  looking  on  at  this  happy  inci 
dent. 

There  was  nothing  in  me  then  —  there  is  nothng 
now  —  which  advised  me  of  being  inappropriately 
the  object  of  such  an  address,  or  my  replying  to  it 
as  gallantly  as  the  junior  clerk  of  the  Cooperative. 
To  do  Forester  justice,  he  came  out  squarely  on  the 
question  of  my  being  entitled  to  the  money  if  he  was, 
but  he  contrived  backhandedly  to  convey  his  sense 
of  my  obtuseness  in  not  deferring  sentimentally  to  a 
male  ascendancy  that  I  did  not  intrinsically  feel. 
I  can  go  back  now  to  these  disquieting  episodes  as 
the  beginning  of  that  maladjustment  of  my  earlier 
years,  in  not  having  a  man  about  toward  whom  I 
could  actually  experience  the  deference  I  was  ex 
pected  to  exhibit. 


83  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

,  Well,  I  had  my  check  for  the  same  amount  and  on 
the  same  occasion  as  my  brother's,  but  the  feeling 
in  the  air  of  its  being  merely  a  concession  to  my 
frowardness,  prevented  me  from  making  any  return 
for  it  that  interfered  with  Forester's  carrying  off  the 
situation  of  coming  into  his  father's  legacy  on  coming 
of  age,  quite  to  my  mother's  satisfaction.  What  it 
might  have  made  for  graciousness  for  once  in  my  life 
to  have  been  the  centre  of  that  dramatic  affection- 
ateness,  I  can  only  guess.  Firm  in  the  determination 
that  since  no  sentiment  went  to  its  bestowal  none 
should  go  to  its  acknowledgment,  I  carried  my  check 
upstairs  and  shook  all  of  the  rugs  out  of  the  window 
to  account  for  my  eyes  being  red  at  ten  o'clock  in  the 
morning.  And  that  was  the  way  the  Powers  took 
to  provide  against  the  complete  submergence  of  the 
actress  in  the  young  lady,  for  though  it  turned  out 
that  I  did  spend  the  greater  part  of  the  money  on  my 
wedding  clothes,  a  portion  of  it  went  for  the  only 
technical  training  I  ever  had. 

The  real  business  of  a  young  lady  in  Taylorville 
was  getting  married,  but  to  avoid  an  obviousness  in 
the  interim,  she  played  the  piano  or  painted  on 
gatin  or  became  interested  in  missions.  If  my 
money  had  fallen  in  eight  months  earlier  I  should 
undoubtedly  have  spent  it  on  the  third  year  at 
Montecito;  as  it  was  I  decided  to  study  elocution. 
It  appeared  a  wholly  fortuitous  choice.  I  was  not 
supposed  to  have  any  talent  for  it,  but  I  burned 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  83 

to  spend  some  of  my  money  sensibly,  and  it  was 
admittedly  sensible  for  a  young  lady  to  take  les 
sons  in  something.  Effie  was  having  music,  Flora 
Haines  painted  plaques;  when  Olivia  joined  Pro 
fessor  Winter's  elocution  classes  at  Temperance  Hall 
mother  said  it  looked  like  throwing  money  away, 
but  of  course  I  could  teach  in  case  anything  hap 
pened,  which  meant  in  case  of  my  not  being  married 
or  being  left  a  widow  with  young  children. 

Professor  Winter  was  the  kind  of  man  who  would 
have  collected  patch  boxes  and  painted  miniatures 
on  ladies'  fans;  not  that  he  could  have  done  anything 
of  the  sort  on  his  income,  but  it  would  have  suited 
the  kind  of  man  he  was.  He  had  small  neat  ways  and 
nice  little  tricks  of  discrimination,  and  microscopic 
enthusiasms  that  hovered  and  fluttered,  enough  of 
them  when  it  came  to  the  rendering  of  a  favourite 
passage,  to  produce  a  kind  of  haze  of  appreciation 
like  a  swarm  of  midges.  Not  being  able  to  afford 
patch  boxes  or  Louis  XV  enamels,  he  collected  ac 
cents  instead.  The  man's  memory  for  phonic  vari 
ations  was  extraordinary;  all  our  accustomed  speech 
was  a  wild  garden  over  which  he  took  little  flights 
and  drops  and  humming  poises,  extracting,  as  it 
were  by  sips,  your  private  history,  things  you  would 
have  probably  told  for  the  asking,  but  objected  to 
having  wrested  from  your  betraying  tongue.  He 
would  come  teetering  forward  on  his  neat  little 
boots,  upon  the  toes  of  which  he  appeared  to  elevate 


84  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

himself  by  pressing  the  tips  of  his  fingers  very  firmly 
together,  and  when  you  committed  yourself  no 
farther  than  to  remark  on  the  state  of  the  weather 
or  the  election  outlook,  he  would  want  to  know  if  you 
hadn't  spent  some  time  of  your  youth  in  the  South, 
or  if  it  was  your  maternal  or  paternal  grandfather 
who  was  Norwegian.  Either  of  which  would  be 
true  and  annoying,  particularly  as  you  weren't  aware 
of  speaking  other  than  the  rest  of  the  world,  for  if 
there  was  anything  quite  and  completely  abhorrent 
to  the  Taylorville  mind  it  was  the  implication  of 
being  different  from  other  Taylorvillians. 

Somewhere  the  Professor  had  picked  up  an  ade 
quate  theory  and  practice  of  voice  production,  though 
I  never  knew  anything  of  his  training  except  that  he 
had  been  an  instructor  in  a  normal  school  and  was 
aggrieved  at  his  dismissal,  After  he  had  advertised 
himself  as  open  for  private  instruction  and  tri- weekly 
classes  at  Temperance  Hall,  there  was  something  al 
most  like  a  concerted  effort  at  keeping  him  in  the 
town,  because  of  the  credit  he  afforded  us  against 
Montecito.  With  the  exception  of  a  much- whiskered 
personage  who  came  over  from  the  business  college  in 
the  winter  to  conduct  evening  classes  in  penmanship, 
he  was  the  only  man  addressed  habitually  as  Profes 
sor,  and  the  only  one  who  wore  evening  dress  at 
public  functions. 

His  dress  coat  imparted  a  particular  touch  of 
elegance  to  occasions  when  he  gave  readings  from 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  85 

"Evangeline"  and  "The  Lady  of  the  Lake"  (Taylor- 
ville  choice),  and  thoroughly  discredited  a  dis 
gruntled  Montecitan  who,  on  the  basis  of  having 
been  to  Chicago  on  his  wedding  trip,  insisted  that 
such  were  only  worn  by  waiters  in  hotels. 

It  would  be  interesting  to  record  that  Professor 
Winter  lent  himself  with  alacrity  to  the  unfolding 
of  my  Gift,  but,  in  fact,  his  imagination  hardly 
strayed  so  far.  He  taught  phonics  and  voice  pro 
duction  and  taught  them  very  well;  probably  he  had 
no  more  practical  acquaintance  with  the  stage  than 
I  had.  Certainly  he  never  suggested  it  for  me,  and 
for  my  part  I  could  hardly  have  explained  why  with 
so  little  encouragement  I  was  so  devoted  to  the 
rather  tedious  drill.  Pauline  was  still  at  the  semi 
nary,  and  the  regular  hours  of  practice  made  a  bul 
wark  against  an  insidious  proprietary  air  which 
Tommy  Bettersworth  began  to  wear.  Besides  the 
voice  training,  I  had  a  system  of  physical  culture, 
artificial  and  unsound  as  I  have  since  learned,  but 
serving  to  restrain  my  too  exuberant  gesture,  and 
much  memorizing  of  poems  and  plays  for  practice 
work.  I  hardly  know  if  the  Professor  had  any 
dramatic  talent  or  not;  probably  not,  as  he  made 
nothing,  I  remember,  of  stopping  me  in  the  middle 
of  a  great  passion  for  the  sake  of  a  dropped  con 
sonant,  and  deprecated  original  readings  on  my 
part. 

It  was  his  relish  for  musical  cadence  as  much  as  its 


86  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

% 

intellectual  appreciation  that  led  him  to  select  the 
Elizabethan  drama,  in  the  great  scenes  of  which  I 
was  letter  perfect  by  the  time  I  had  come  to  the  end 
of  the  Professor's  instruction,  and  at  the  end  too, 
it  seemed,  of  my  devices  for  dodging  the  destiny  of 
women. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

I  HAVE  tried  to  sketch  to  you  how  in  Taylorville  we 
were  allowed  to  stumble  on  the  grown-up  conscious 
ness  of  sex,  but  I  can  give  you  no  idea  of  the  extent 
to  which  we  were  prevented  from  the  grown-up 
judgment. 

Somewhere  between  the  ages  of  sixteen  and  eigh 
teen,  one  was  loosed  on  a  free  and  lively  social  inter 
course  from  which  one  was  expected  to  emerge  later, 
triumphantly  mated.  This  was  obligatory;  otherwise 
your  family  sighed  and  said  that  somehow  Olivia 
didn't  seem  to  know  how  to  catch  a  husband,  and 
then  painstakingly  refrained  from  the  subject  in 
your  presence;  or  your  mother,  if  she  was  particu 
larly  loyal,  said  she  had  always  thought  there  was 
no  call  for  a  girl  to  marry  if  she  didn't  feel  to  want 
to.  But  anything  resembling  maternal  interference  in 
your  behalf  was  looked  upon  as  worldly  minded,  or  at 
the  least  unnecessary.  The  custom  of  chaperonage 
was  unheard  of;  girls  were  supposed  to  be  trusted. . 

I  do  not  recall  now  that  I  ever  had  any  particular 
instruction  as  to  how  to  conduct  myself  toward  young 
men  except  that  they  were  never  on  any  account  to 
take  liberties.  Whatever  else  went  to  the  difficult 
business  of  mating  you  were  supposed  to  pick  up. 

87 


88  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

That  I  did  not  pass  through  this  period  in  entire 
obliviousness  was  due  to  Pauline,  who  had  the  keen 
est  appreciation  of  her  effect  on  the  opposite  sex. 
She  was  the  sort  of  girl  who  is  described  as  having 
always  had  a  great  deal  of  attention;  she  had  a  nice 
Procrustean  notion  of  the  sort  of  young  man  to  be  en 
gaged  to  —  our  maiden  imagination  hardly  went  far 
ther  than  that  —  and  her  young  ladyhood  appeared 
to  be  a  process  of  trying  it  on  the  greatest  possible 
number  of  eligible  Taylorvillians.  When  she  came 
home  from  Montecito  she  had  already  met  Henry 
Mills  at  the  house  of  a  roommate  where  she  had  spent 
the  Easter  vacation,  and  he  had  sent  her  flowers  at 
commencement  and  verses  of  his  own  composition. 
It  was  Pauline  who  explained  to  me  that  unless  I 
had  some  young  man  like  Tommy  Bettersworth  who 
could  be  counted  on,  I  could  hardly  hope  to  be  "in" 
things  —  when  they  made  up  a  party  to  go  sleighing, 
for  instance,  or  a  picnic  to  Willesden  Lake.  I  liked 
being  in  things  and  did  not  altogether  dislike  Tommy 
Bettersworth.  He  was  a  thoroughly  creditable  beau 
and  required  very  little  handling,  for  even  as  early 
as  that  I  had  an  inkling  of  what  I  have  long  since 
concluded,  that  a  man  who  requires  overmuch  to  be 
played  and  baited,  held  off  and  on,  is  rather  poor 
game  after  you  have  got  him.  It  worried  Pauline 
not  a  little  that  I  forgave  Tommy  so  lightly  for  small 
offences;  she  was  afraid  it  might  appear  that  I  liked 
him  too  much,  when  in  truth  it  was  only  that  I  liked 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  89 

him  too  little.  And  for  complacence,  if  I  had  had 
any  disposition  toward  it,  I  was  saved  by  the  shocking 
example  of  Forester,  all  of  whose  relations  were 
tinged  by  his  vocation  of  model  son.  He  had  ac 
quired  by  this  time  a  manner,  by  the  intimacy, 
greater  than  is  common  in  boys,  with  which  he  lived 
into  the  feminine  life  of  the  household,  and  by  his 
daily  performance  of  measuring  off  petticoats  and 
matching  hose,  which  admitted  him  to  families 
where  we  visited,  on  a  footing  that  enabled  him  to 
flirt  with  the  daughters  under  the  very  apron-strings 
of  their  mothers.  You  couldn't  somehow  maintain 
a  strict  virginal  severity  with  a  young  man  who  had 
just  taken  an  informed  and  personal  interest  in  your 
mother's  flannelette  wrappers,  the  credit  of  whose 
dutifulness  was  a  warrant  for  his  not  meaning 
anything  in  particular.  In  short,  Forrie  spooned. 

I  think  now  there  was  some  excuse  for  him;  he 
had  been  wrenched  very  early  by  his  affections 
from  the  normal  outbreaks  of  adolescence;  he  had 
never  to  my  knowledge  been  "out  with  the  boys." 
Unless  he  got  it  in  the  business  of  junior  clerk  at  the 
Cooperative,  he  could  hardly  be  said  to  have  a  male 
life  at  all;  he  was  being  shaped  to  a  man's  per 
formance  at  the  expense  of  his  mannishness.  But 
against  his  philandering  rose  up,  not  only  the  fas 
tidiousness  of  girlhood,  but  some  latent  sense  of 
Tightness,  as  keen  in  me  as  the  violinist's  for  the 
variation  of  tone;  something  that  questioned  the 


90  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

justice  of  pronouncing  thoroughly  moral  a  young 
man  who,  if  he  never  went  over  the  brink,  was  willing 
to  spend  a  considerable  portion  of  his  time  on  the 
edge  of  it.  I  should  have  admired  Forester  more  at 
this  juncture  if  he  had  been  a  little  wild  —  and  I 
knew  perfectly  that  my  mother  would  have  inter 
dicted  any  social  life  for  me  whatever  if  I  had  per 
mitted  a  tithe  of  the  familiarities  allowed  to  my 
brother. 

Among  the  other  things  which  a  girl  was  expected 
to  "pick  up,"  along  with  the  art  of  attracting  a  hus 
band,  was  the  vital  information  with  which  she  was 
expected  to  meet  the  occasion  of  marrying  one.  It 
was  all  a  part  of  the  general  assumption  of  the  truth 
as  something  not  suitable  for  the  young  to  know, 
that  nobody  told  us  any  of  these  things  if  they  could 
help  it.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  there  was  not  a 
certain  amount  of  half  information  whispered  about 
among  the  girls,  who  by  the  avidity  for  such  whis 
perings  established  themselves  as  not  quite  nice. 
But  Pauline  Allingham  and  I  were  nice  girls.  What 
this  meant  was  that  nothing  that  pertained  to  the 
mystery  of  marriage  reached  us  through  all  the  sup 
pression  and  evasions  of  the  social  conspiracy, 
except  the  obviousness  of  maternity.  I  remember 
how  intimations  of  it  as  part  of  our  legitimate  ex 
perience,  began  to  grow  upon  us  with  a  profound  and 
tender  curiosity  toward  very  young  children,  and, 
particularly  on  Pauline's  part,  a  great  shyness  of 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  91 

being  seen  in  their  company.  But  we  were  not  ex 
pected  to  possess  ourselves  of  accurate  information 
until  we  were  already  involved  in  it 

We  had  reached  the  age  when  matrons  no  longer 
avoided  references  to  its  most  conspicuous  phases  in 
our  presence,  before  we  found  words  for  mentioning 
it  to  one  another.  There  was  a  young  aunt  of  Paul 
ine's  lent  something  to  that. 

She  was  a  sister  of  Mr.  Allingham,  come  to  stay 
with  them  while  her  husband  was  absent  somewhere 
in  the  West.  Pauline  told  me  about  it  one  of  the 
week-ends  she  spent  at  home  from  Montecito;  this 
was  Saturday  afternoon,  and  she  had  found  the  aunt 
in  the  house  on  her  return  the  evening  before. 

"Do  you  know,"  she  said,  "it  is  very  queer  the 
way  I  feel  about  Aunt  Alice  —  the  way  she  is,  you 
know.  Mamma  hadn't  told  me,  and  when  I  came 
into  the  sitting  room  and  saw  her,  I  thought  I  was 
going  to  cry;  and  it  wasn't  that  I  was  sorry  either 
.  .  .  I'm  awfully  fond  of  her.  I  just  felt  it." 

"Yes,  I  know,"  I  admitted. 

"Aunt  Alice  is  so  sensible,"  Pauline  explained  a 
few  weeks  later,  "she  talks  to  me  a  great  deal;  she's 
only  a  few  years  older  than  I  am.  She  has  shown  me 
all  her  things  for  the  baby.  Mamma  didn't  think 
she  ought .  .  .  you  know  how  mothers  are.  They're 
in  the  bureau  drawer  in  the  best  room.  I'll  show 
them  to  you  some  time;  Alice  won't  mind." 

Alice  didn't  mind,  it  appeared,  so  it  must  have 


92  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

been  shyness  that  led  us  to  select  the  afternoon  when 
the  married  women  were  away,  and  though  I  cannot 
forgive  the  conditions  which  led  us  so  surreptitiously 
to  touch  the  fringe  of  the  great  experience,  I  own  still 
to  some  tenderness  for  the  two  girls  with  their  heads 
together  that  bright  hot  afternoon,  over  the  bureau 
drawer  in  Mrs.  Allingham's  best  room.  Pauline 
showed  me  a  little  sacque  which  she  had  crocheted. 

"Mother  thought  I  was  too  young,  but  Alice  said 
I  might." 

"You  must  have  liked  to,  awfully,"  I  envied. 

"That's  one  of  the  nice  things  about  having  chil 
dren,  I  should  think"  —  Pauline  fingered  a  hem 
stitched  slip  —  "y°u  can  make  things  for  them." 

"Which  would  you  rather  have,  girls  or  boys?"  I 
hazarded. 

"Oh,  girls;  you  can  always  dress  them  so  prettily." 

"But  boys  .  .  .  they  can  do  so  many  things  when 
they  grow  up."  I  felt  rather  strongly  on  that  point. 

"Alice  says"  —  Pauline  folded  the  little  frock  — 
"that  she's  so  glad  to  have  it  she  doesn't  care  which 
it  is."  Something,  perhaps  an  echo  of  my  mother's 
experience,  pricked  in  me. 

"They  aren't  always  as  glad  as  that." 

"I  suppose  not.  Alice  is  having  this  one  because 
she  wants  it." 

We  looked  at  one  another.  We  would  have  liked 
to  have  spoken  further,  to  have  defined  ourselves, 
despoiled  ourselves  of  tenderness,  nobilities,  but 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  93 

around  the  whole  subject  lay  the  blank  expanse  of 
our  ignorance.  We  locked  the  drawer  again  and  went 
out  and  played  croquet.  And  that  was  how  we 
stood  toward  our  normal  destiny  that  summer  when 
Pauline  was  wondering  if  Henry  Mills  meant  to  pro 
pose  to  her,  and  I  was  wondering  how  much  longer 
I  could  keep  Tommy  Bettersworth  from  proposing 
to  me. 

I  managed  to  stave  it  off  until  the  end  of  Septem 
ber.  On  the  twenty-second  of  that  month  there  was 
a  picnic  at  Willesden  Lake.  There  were  ten 
couples  of  us,  and  Flora  Haines,  who  was  wanted  to 
count  even  with  a  young  man  who  was  to  join  us  at 
the  lake,  a  stranger  to  most  of  us,  nephew  to  one 
of  the  wealthiest  farmers  in  the  township.  We  had 
always  wished  there  might  have  been  young  people 
at  the  Garrett  farm,  and  there  was  some  talk  of 
this  nephew,  who  was  to  come  on  a  visit,  being 
adopted. 

Some  of  our  brothers  had  made  his  acquaintance, 
and  Pauline,  who  had  met  him  at  Montecito,  had 
warranted  him  as  "interesting."  I  believe  Flora 
Haines  was  invited  to  pair  with  him  because  every 
girl  felt  that  Flora  would  be  eminently  safe  to  trust 
her  own  young  man  to  in  the  event  of  Helmeth  Gar 
rett  proving  more  worth  while. 

Henry  Mills,  who  was  reading  law  at  the  county 
seat  of  the  adjoining  county,  had  come  over  for  the 
picnic  and  was  expected  to  bring  matters  to  a  crisis 


94  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

with  Pauline,  and  Forester  had  a  day  off  to  take  Belle 
Endsleigh,  who  was  at  the  point  of  pitying  him  be 
cause,  though  he  had  such  an  affectionate  disposition, 
so  long  as  his  mother  depended  on  him  he  couldn't 
think  of  marrying.  We  had  no  chaperone  of  course; 
several  of  the  couples  were  engaged,  and  there  were 
brothers;  we  wouldn't  have  put  up  with  the  im 
plication  that  we  were  not  able  to  manage  by  our 
selves. 

It  was  the  sort  of  day  .  .  .  soft  Indian  summer, 
painted  woodlands,  gossamer  glinting  high  in  the 
windless  air  ...  on  which  Forester  found  it  necessary 
to  hope  brotherly  that  I  should  be  able  to  get  through 
it  without  being  silly.  By  that  he  meant  that  the 
submerged  Olivia,  however  interestingly  she  might 
read  in  a  book,  was  highly  incomprehensible  and 
nearly  always  ridiculous  to  her  contemporaries. 

Willesden  Lake  was  properly  a  drainage  pond  of 
four  or  five  acres  in  extent,  drawn  like  a  bow  about 
the  contour  of  two  hills;  water-lilies  grew  at  the 
head  where  a  stream  came  in,  and  muskrats  built  at 
the  lower  end.  The  picnic  ground  was  in  the  hollow 
between  the  two  hills,  by  a  spring,  where  the  grass 
grew  smooth  like  a  lawn  to  the  roots  of  oaks  burning 
blood  red  from  leaf  to  leaf.  As  it  turned  out,  though 
we  put  off  lunch  for  him  for  an  hour,  young  Mr.  Gar- 
rett  did  not  come,  and  as  the  party  sat  about  on  the 
mossy  hummocks  in  the  quiet  of  repletion,  I  thought 
nothing  could  be  so  much  worth  while  as  to  leave 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  95 

Tommy  in  care  of  Flora  Haines  and  get  away  into 
the  woods  by  myself.  The  soul  of  the  weather  had 
got  into  my  soul  and  I  felt  I  should  discredit  myself 
with  Forester  if  I  stayed.  There  was  a  little  foot 
path  that  led  down  by  a  rill  to  the  lake,  and  as  I  took 
it,  there  was  scarcely  a  sound  louder  than  the  soft 
down-rustle  of  the  painted  leaves.  There  were  two 
or  three  old  boats,  half  water-logged,  tied  at  the  head 
of  the  lake,  and  one  of  these  I  found  and  paddled 
across  to  the  opposite  bank.  I  had  not  known  there 
was  a  path  there  opening  from  the  dewberry  bushes 
that  dipped  along  the  border,  but  the  spirit  in  my  feet 
answered  to  its  invitation.  I  followed  it  up  the  hill 
through  the  leaf  drift  that  heaped  whispering  in  the 
smoky  wood.  I  spread  out  my  arms  as  I  went  and 
began  to  move  to  the  rhythm  of  chanted  verse. 
Where  the  red  and  gold  and  russet  banners  brushed 
me  I  was  touched  delicately  as  with  flame.  I  had 
on  a  very  pretty  dress  that  day,  I  remember,  a  thin 
organdy  with  a  leaf  pattern,  made  up  over  yellow 
sateen,  and  the  consciousness  of  suitability  worked 
happily  on  my  mind.  At  the  top  of  the  hill  I  struck 
into  an  old  wood  road  where  it  passed  through  a 
grove  of  young  hickory,  blazing  yellow  like  a  host. 
Here  I  went  slowly  and  dropped  the  chanting  to  the 
measure  of  classic  English  verse;  it  was  the  only 
means  of  expression  Taylorville  had  provided  me. 
Scene  after  scene  I  went  through  happy  and  oblivi 
ous.  I  had  been  at  it  half  an  hour  perhaps,  moving 


96  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

forward  with  the  natural  impetus  of  the  play,  in  the 
faint  old  wagon  tracks,  and  had  got  as  far  as 


—  Flowers  that  affrighted  she  let  fall 
From  Dis's  wagon!  — 


when  I  was  startled  by  the  clapping  of  hands,  and 
looked  up  to  see  a  young  man  sitting  on  the  top  of  a 
rail  fence  that  ran  straight  across  the  way,  as  though 
he  might  have  stopped  there  to  rest  in  the  act  of 
climbing  over. 

"I  knew  you  would  see  me  the  next  minute,"  he 
said,  "and  I  wanted  to  be  discovered  in  the  act  of 
appreciation."  He  sprang  down  from  the  fence  and 
came  toward  me,  taking  off  his  hat.  "I  suppose  you 
are  from  the  picnic;  I  expected  to  find  you  some 
where  about.  I  am  Helmeth  Garrett." 

"They're  at  the  spring  —  we  waited  lunch  for 
you.  I  am  Miss  Lattimore;  Olivia  May,"  I  sup 
plemented.  I  was  a  little  doubtful  about  that  point, 
for  at  Taylorville  we  called  one  another  by  our  first 
names.  I  was  pleased  with  the  swiftness  with  which 
he  struck  upon  a  permissible  compromise. 

"  I  owe  you  all  sorts  of  apologies,  Miss  Olivia,  but 
the  mare  I  was  to  ride  went  lame  and  uncle  couldn't 
spare  me  another,  so  I  had  an  early  lunch  at  the  house 
and  walked  over."  As  he  stood  looking  down  at  me 
I  saw  that  he  had  a  crop  of  unruly  dark  hair  and 
what  there  was  in  his  face  that  Pauline  had  found 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  97 

i 
interesting.     He  wore  a  soft  red  tie,  knotted  loosely 

at  the  collar  of  a  white  flannel  shirt,  and  for  the  rest 
of  him  was  dressed  very  much  as  other  young  men. 
All  at  once  a  spark  of  irrepressible  friendliness  flashed 
up  in  smiles  between  us. 

It  seemed  the  merest  chance  then  that  I  had 
come  across  the  wood  to  meet  him.  In  the  light 
of  what  has  happened  since,  I  see  that  the  guardian 
of  my  submerged  self  was  doing  what  it  could  for 
me;  but  against  the  embattled  social  forces  of  Tay- 
lorville  what  could  even  the  gods  do! 

"If  you  will  take  me  to  the  others,"  he  suggested, 
"I  can  make  my  excuses,  and  then  we  can  talk." 
It  was  remarkable,  I  thought,  that  he  should  have 
discovered  so  early  that  we  would  wish  to  talk.  We 
began  to  move  in  the  direction  of  the  lake. 

"Were  you  doing  a  play?"  he  asked.     I  nodded. 

"How  long  were  you  watching  me?" 

"Since  you  passed  the  plum  brush  yonder;  it  was 
bully!  Are  you  going  on  the  stage?"  I  explained 
about  Professor  Winter  and  the  elocution  lessons. 

"They  don't  approve  of  the  stage  in  Taylorville," 
I  finished,  touched  by  the  vanishing  trace  of  a  reali 
zation  that  up  to  this  moment  the  objection  would 
have  been  stated  personally. 

"And  with  all  your  talent!  Oh,  I  know  what  I'm 
saying.  I  lived  in  Chicago  four  years  and  saw  a  lot 
of  the  theatre." 

He  began  to  talk  to  me  of  the  stage,  probably 


98  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

much  of  it  neither  informed  nor  profitable,  but  I  had 
never  heard  it  talked  of  before  in  unembarrassed 
relevancy  to  living,  and  he  had  that  trick  of  speech 
that  goes  with  the  achieving  propensity,  of  accelerat 
ing  his  own  energy  as  he  talked,  so  that  its  back 
water  fairly  floated  us  into  the  ease  of  intimacy. 
There  was  no  doubt  we  were  tremendously  pleased 
with  one  another.  I  was  throbbing  still  with  the 
measure  of  verse  and  moved  half  trippingly  to  the 
rhythm  of  my  blood. 

"Do  you  dance  too?"  What  went  with  that  im 
plied  something  personal  and  complimentary. 

"Oh,  no  —  a  few  steps  I've  picked  up  at  school. 
That's  another  of  the  things  we  don't  approve  at 
Taylorville." 

"I  say,  what  a  lot  of  old  mossbacks  there  must 
be  about  here  any  way.  Take  my  uncle,  now  .  .  .  ." 
He  went  on  to  tell  me  how  he  had  tried  to  induce 
his  uncle,  who  could  afford  it,  to  advance  the  money 
for  technical  training  in  engineering.  Uncle  Garrett 
was  of  the  opinion  that  Helmeth  would  do  better  to 
get  a  job  with  some  good  man  and  "pick  up  things. 
.  .  .  always  managed  to  get  along  by  rule  of 
thumb  himself,"  said  the  nephew,  "and  thinks  all 
the  rest  of  us  ought  to.  I  said,  'How  would  it  be 
with  a  doctor,  now,  just  to  scramble  up  his  medicine?' 
but  you  can't  get  through  to  my  uncle.  He  thinks 
a  man  who  can  run  a  thrashing  machine  is  an  en 
gineer." 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  99 

I  remember  that  we  found  it  necessary  to  sit  down 
on  the  slope  of  the  hill  toward  the  pond  while  he 
sketched  for  me  his  notion  of  what  an  engineer's 
career  might  be.  "But  you've  got  to  have  technical 
training  .  .  .  got  to!  Talk  about  rule  of  thumb 
.  .  .  it's  like  going  at  it  with  no  thumbs  at  all."  In 
the  midst  of  this  we  remembered  that  we  ought  to 
be  looking  for  the  rest  of  the  picnickers.  Once  in 
the  boat,  however,  there  was  a  muskrat's  nest  which, 
as  something  new  to  him,  had  to  be  poked  into,  and 
we  stopped  to  gather  lilies,  which  I  could  not  have 
done  by  myself  without  wetting  my  dress.  When  we 
came  at  last  to  the  spring,  we  found  the  lunch  baskets 
huddled  under  the  oak  and  nobody  about. 

I  think  we  must  have  been  very  far  gone  by  this 
time  in  the  young  rapture  of  intimacy.  The  wood 
was  smokily  still,  and  we  scuffed  great  heaps  of  the 
leaves  together  as  we  walked  about  pretending  to 
look  for  the  others.  I  remember  it  seemed  a  singular 
flame-touched  circumstance  that  the  leaves  flew  up 
from  under  our  feet  and  fell  lightly  on  our  faces  and 
our  hair. 

"I  suppose  we  can't  help  finding  them;  the  wonder 
is  they  haven't  been  spoiling  our  good  talk  before 


now." 


"Oh,"  I  protested,  "if  you  hadn't  been  coming 
to  look  for  them  you  wouldn't  have  met  me." 

"And  now  that  we  have  met,  we  are  going  to  keep 
on.  I'm  coming  to  see  you.  May  I?" 


100  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"If  you  care  so  much  .  .  .  ."  A  little  spiral  of 
wind  rising  fountain-wise  out  of  the  breathlessness 
whirled  up  a  smother  of  brightening  leaves;  it  caught 
my  skirts  and  whipped  them  against  his  knees.  It 
seemed  to  have  blown  our  hands  together  too,  though 
I  am  at  a  loss  to  know  how  that  was. 

"Care!"  he  said.  "If  I  care?  Oh,  you  beauty, 
you  wonder!"  All  at  once  he  had  kissed  me. 

The  electrical  moment  hung  in  the  air,  poised, 
took  flight  upward  in  dizzying  splendour.  Suddenly 
from  within  the  wood  came  a  little  snigger  of 
laughter. 


CHAPTER  IX 

I  DO  not  know  how  long  it  took  for  the  certainty 
that  I  had  been  kissed  by  an  utter  stranger  in  the 
presence  of  the  entire  picnic,  to  work  through  the 
singing  flames  in  which  that  kiss  had  wrapped  me. 
We  must  have  walked  on  almost  immediately  in 
the  direction  of  the  snigger;  I  remember  a  kind  of 
clutch  of  my  spirit  toward  the  mere  mechanical  act 
of  walking,  to  hold  me  fast  to  the  time  and  place 
from  which  there  was  an  inward  rush  to  escape.  We 
walked  on.  They  were  all  sitting  together  under 
a  bank  of  hazel  and  the  girls'  laps  were  filled  with 
the  brown  clusters.  Out  of  my  whirling  dimness  I 
heard  Helmeth  Garrett  explaining,  as  I  introduced 
him,  how  he  had  come  across  me  in  the  wood,  look 
ing  for  them. 

"And  of  course,"  suggested  Charlie  Gower,  "in 
such  good  company  you  weren't  in  a  hurry  about 
looking  for  the  rest  of  us."  I  remembered  the  as 
paragus  bed  and  was  glad  I  had  slapped  him. 

"No,"  my  companion  looked  him  over  very  coolly, 
"now  that  I've  seen  some  of  the  rest  of  you  I'm  glad 
I  didn't  hurry."  Plainly  it  wasn't  going  to  do  to 
try  to  take  it  out  of  Helmeth  Garrett. 

As  we  began  by  common  consent  to  move  back  to 

101 


102  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  spring,  Forester  drew  me  by  the  arm  behind  the 
hazel.  He  was  divided  between  a  brotherly  disgust 
at  my  lapse,  and  delight  to  have  caught  the  prim 
Olivia  tripping. 

"Well,"  he  exclaimed,  "y°u  have  done  it!"  Con 
sidering  what  I  knew  of  Forester's  affairs  this  was 
unbearable. 

"Oh!  it  isn't  for  you  to  talk " 

"What  I  want  to  know  is,  whether  I  am  to  thrash 
him  or  not?" 

"Thrash  him?"  I  wondered. 

"For  getting  you  talked  about  .  .  .  off  there  in  the 
woods  all  afternoon!" 

"We  weren't "  I  began,  but  suddenly  I  saw 

the  white  bolls  of  the  sycamores  redden  with  the 
westering  sun;  we  must  have  been  three  hours  cover 
ing  what  was  at  most  a  half  hour's  walk.  "Don't 
be  vulgar,  Forester,"  I  went  on,  with  my  chin  in  the 
air. 

"Oh,  well,"  was  my  brother's  parting  shot,  "I 
don't  know  as  I  ought  to  make  any  objection,  seeing 
you  didn't." 

That,  I  felt,  was  the  weakness  of  my  position;  I 
not  only  hadn't  made  any  objection,  I  hadn't  felt 
any  shame;  the  annoyance,  the  hurt  of  outraged 
maidenliness,  whatever  was  the  traditional  attitude, 
hadn't  come.  Inwardly  I  burned  with  the  woods 
afire,  the  red  west,  the  white  star  like  a  torch  that 
came  out  above  it.  On  the  way  home  Helmeth 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  103 

Garrett  rode  with  us  as  far  as  the  main  road  and 
was  particularly  attentive  to  Pauline  and  Flora 
Haines.  I  remember  it  came  to  me  dimly  that 
there  was  something  designedly  protective  in  this; 
there  was  more  or  less  veiled  innuendo  flying  about 
which  failed  to  get  through  to  me.  Pauline  put  it 
quite  plainly  for  me  when  she  came  to  talk  things 
over  the  day  after  the  picnic.  She  was  sympa 
thetic. 

"Oh,  my  dear,  it  must  be  dreadful  for  you,"  she 
cooed;  "a  perfect  stranger,  and  getting  you  talked 
about  that  way!" 

"So  I  am  talked  about?" 

"My  dear,  what  could  you  expect?  And  in  plain 
sight  of  us.  If  you  had  only  pushed  him  away,  or 
something." 

"  I  couldn't,"  I  said,  "I  was  so  .  .  .  astonished."  In 
the  night  I  had  found  myself  explaining  to  Pauline 
how  this  affair  of  Helmeth  Garrett  had  differed  im 
portantly  from  all  similar  instances;  now  I  saw  its 
shining  surfaces  dimmed  with  comment  like  un wiped 
glass. 

"That's  just  what  I  said!"  Pauline  was  pleased 
with  herself.  "I  told  Belle  Endsleigh  you  weren't 
used  to  that  sort  of  thing  .  .  .  you  were  completely 
overcome.  But  of  course  he  wasn't  really  a  gentle 
man  or  he  wouldn't  have  done  it."  I  do  not  know 
why  at  this  moment  it  occurred  to  me  that  probably 
Henry  Mills  hadn't  proposed  to  Pauline  after  all,  but 


104  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

before  I  could  frame  a  discreet  question  she  was  off 
in  another  direction. 

"What  will  Tommy  Bettersworth  say?" 
"Why,  what  has  he  got  to  do  with  it?" 
"O-Zw-ia!    After    the    way    you've    encouraged 
him  .  .  ." 

"You  mean  because  I  went  to  the  picnic  with 
him?  Well,  what  can  he  do  about  it?"  Pauline 
gave  me  up  with  a  gesture. 

"Tommy  is  the  soul  of  chivalry,"  she  said,  "and 
anybody  can  see  he  is  crazy  about  you,  simply 
crazy."  What  I  really  wanted  was  that  she  should 
go  on  talking  about  Helmeth  Garrett.  I  wanted 
ground  for  putting  to  her  that  since  all  we  had  been 
sedulously  taught  about  kissing  and  all  "that  sort  of 
thing"  —  that  it  was  horrid,  cheapening,  insufferable 
—  had  failed  to  establish  itself,  had  in  fact  come  as 
a  sword,  divining  mystery,  it  couldn't  be  dealt  with 
on  the  accepted  Taylorville  basis.  I  felt  the  quality 
of  achievement  in  Helmeth  Garrett's  right  to  kiss 
me,  a  right  which  I  was  sure  he  lacked  only  the  oc 
casion  to  establish.  But  when  the  occasion  came  it 
went  all  awry. 

It  was  the  next  Sunday  morning,  and  all  down 
Polk  Street  the  frost-bitten  flower  borders  were  a 
little  made  up  for  by  the  passage  between  the  shoals 
of  maple  leaves  that  lined  the  walks,  of  whole  flocks 
of  bright  winged,  new  fall  hats  on  their  way  to  church. 
Mother  and  Effie  were  in  front  and  two  of  my  Sun- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  105 

day-school  scholars  had  scurried  up  like  rabbits  out 
of  the  fallen  leafage  and  tucked  themselves  on  either 
side  of  my  carefully  held  skirts.  Suddenly  there  was 
a  rattle  of  buggy  wheels  on  the  winter  roughed  road; 
it  turned  in  by  Niles's  corner  and  drove  directly 
toward  us;  the  top  was  down  and  I  made  out  by  the 
quick  pricking  of  my  blood,  the  Garrett  bays  and 
Helmeth  with  his  hat  off,  his  hair  tousled,  and  a 
bright  soft  tie  swinging  free  of  his  vest.  You  saw 
heads  turning  all  along  the  block  in  discreet  censure 
of  his  unsabbatical  behaviour.  He  recognized  me 
almost  immediately  and  turned  the  team  with  inten 
tion  to  our  side  of  the  street.  He  was  going  to  speak 
to  me  ...  he  was  speaking.  My  mother's  back  stif 
fened,  she  didn't  know  of  course.  Forrie  wouldn't 
have  had  the  face  to  tell  her,  but  how  many  eyes  on 
us  up  and  down  the  street  did  know?  A  Sunday- 
school  teacher  in  the  midst  of  her  scholars  .... 
and  he  had  kissed  me  on  Thursday! 

"Olivia,"  said  my  mother,  "do  you  know  that 
young  man?  Such  manners  .  .  .  Sunday  morning, 
too.  Well,  I  am  glad  that  you  had  the  sense  to 
ignore  him;"  and  I  did  not  know  until  that  moment 
that  I  had. 

It  was  because  of  my  habit  of  living  inwardly,  I 
suppose,  that  it  never  occurred  to  me  that  the  in 
cident  could  have  any  other  bearing  on  our  relations 
than  the  secret  one  of  confirming  me  in  my  impres 
sion  of  our  intimacy  being  on  a  superior,  excluding 


106  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

footing.  He  had  come,  as  I  was  perfectly  aware,  to 
renew  it  at  the  point  of  breaking  off,  and  this  se 
curity  quite  blinded  me  to  the  effect  my  cold  recep 
tion  might  have  upon  him.  That  he  would  fail  to 
understand  how  I  was  hemmed  and  pinned  in  by 
Taylorville,  hadn't  occurred  to  me,  not  even  when 
he  passed  us  again  on  the  way  home  from  church, 
driving  recklessly.  His  hat  was  on  this  time,  deter 
minedly  to  one  side,  and  he  was  smoking,  smoking  a 
cigar.  I  thought  at  first  he  had  not  seen  me,  but 
he  turned  suddenly  when  he  was  quite  past  and 
swept  me  a  flourish  with  it  held  between  two  fingers 
of  the  hand  that  touched  his  hat. 

At  that  time  in  Taylorville  no  really  nice  young 
man  smoked,  at  least  not  where  he  would  get  found 
out.  This  offensiveness  in  the  face  of  the  returning 
church-goers  was  too  flagrant  to  admit  even  the 
appearance  of  noticing  it,  but  that  it  would  be 
noticed,  taken  stock  of  in  the  general  summing  up 
of(  our  relation,  I  was  sickeningly  aware. 

Tommy  Bettersworth  put  one  version  of  it  for  me 
comfortingly  when  he  came  in  the  evening  to  take 
me  to  church. 

"I  saw  you  turn  down  that  Garrett  fellow  this 
morning.  Served  him  right  .  .  .  that  and  the  way  you 
behaved  Thursday  .  .  .  just  as  if  you  did  not  find  him 
worth  rowing  about.  A  lot  of  girls  make  a  fuss,  and 
it's  only  to  draw  a  fellow  on;  and  now  you're  going 
to  church  with  me  the  same  as  usual;  that'll  show 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  107 

'em  what  I  think  of  it."  Now,  I  had  clean  forgotten 
that  Tommy  might  come  that  evening.  I  was 
whelmed  with  the  certainty  that  Helmeth  Garrett 
had  gone  back  to  the  farm  after  all  without  seeing 
me;  and  the  moment  Tommy  came  through  the  gate 
I  had  one  of  those  rifts  of  lucidity  in  which  I  saw  him 
whole  and  limited,  pasted  flat  against  the  back 
ground  of  Taylorville  without  any  perspective  of 
imagination,  and  was  taken  mightily  with  the  wish 
to  explain  to  him  where  he  stood,  once  for  all,  outside 
and  disconnected  with  anything  that  was  vital  and 
important  to  me.  But  quite  unexpectedly,  before 
I  could  frame  a  beginning,  he  had  presented  himself 
to  me  in  a  new  light.  He  was  cover,  something  to 
get  behind  in  order  to  exercise  myself  more  freely 
in  the  things  he  couldn't  understand. 

Something  more  was  bound  to  come  out  of  my 
relation  to  Helmeth  Garrett;  the  incident  couldn't 
go  on  hanging  in  the  air  that  way;  and  in  the  mean 
time  here  was  an  opportunity  to  put  it  out  of  public 
attention  by  going  out  with  Tommy.  It  did  hang 
in  the  air,  however,  for  three  days,  during  which  I 
pulsed  and  sickened  with  expectancy;  by  Thursday 
it  had  reached  a  point  where  I  knew  that  if  Helmeth 
Garrett  didn't  come  and  kiss  me  again  I  shouldn't 
be  able  to  bear  it.  It  was  soon  after  sundown  that  I 
felt  him  coming. 

I  took  a  great  many  turns  in  the  garden,  which, 
carrying  me  occasionally  out  of  reach  of  the  click 


108  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

of  the  gate  latch,  afforded  me  the  relief  of  think 
ing  that  he  might  have  arrived  in  the  interval 
when  I  was  out  of  hearing.  His  approaching  tread 
was  within  me.  When  it  was  just  seven  my  mother 
came  out  and  called: 

"Olivia,  I  promised  Mrs.  Endsleigh  a  starter  of 
yeast;  I  have  just  remembered.  Could  you  take  it 
to  her?" 

The  Endsleigh  backyard  was  separated  from  ours 
by  a  vacant  lot,  the  houses  fronting  on  parallel 
streets;  there  was  no  sound  at  the  gate  and  mother 
had  the  bowl  in  a  white  napkin  held  out  to  me,  with 
a  long  message  about  where  the  sewing  circle  was  to 
meet  next  Thursday. 

"If  any  body  comes," — for  the  life  of  me  I  couldn't 
have  kept  that  back, — "you  can  tell  them  I'll  be  back 
in  a  minute,"  I  cautioned  her. 

"Are  you  expecting  anybody?" 

"Only  Tommy,"  I  prevaricated,  instantly  and 
unaccountably.  I  saw  my  mother  look  at  me  rather 
oddly  over  the  tops  of  the  glasses  she  had  lately 
assumed.  On  the  Endsleigh's  back  porch  I  found 
Belle  in  evening  dress  gathering  ivy  berries  for  her 
hair. 

"Oh,"  she  said,  to  my  plain  appearance,  "aren't 
you  going?" 

"Going  where?" 

"Oh,  if  you  don't  know  .  .  .  to  Flora's."  Belle 
was  embarrassed. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  109 

"I  hadn't  heard  of  it." 

"It's  just  a  few  friends,"  Belle  wavered  between 
sympathy  and  superiority.  "Flora  is  so  particu 
lar  ...  ." 

"I  couldn't  have  gone  anyway,"  I  interpolated, 
"I  have  an  engagement."  I  had  to  find  Mrs.  End- 
sleigh  after  that  and  deliver  my  errand. 

When  I  reached  home  mother  was  sitting  placidly 
just  outside  the  circle  of  the  lamp,  knitting.  She 
only  looked  up  as  I  entered  and  I  had  to  drag  it  out 
of  her  at  last. 

"Has  anybody  been  here?" 

"Nobody  that  you  would  care  to  see." 

"But  who?" 

"That  fast-looking  young  man  who  tried  to  speak 
to  you  on  Sunday.  I'm  glad  you  have  a  proper  feel 
ing  about  such  things.  Mr.  Garrett's  nephew,  didn't 
you  say?  I  told  him  you  were  engaged." 

"Oh,  mother!"  I  was  out  in  panting  haste.  At 
the  gate  I  ran  square  into  Tommy  Bettersworth. 

"Did  you  see  anybody?" 

"Nobody.  I  came  through  by  Davis's.  I  was 
coming  in,"  he  suggested,  as  I  stood  peering  into  the 
dark. 

"I  thought  you'd  be  going  to  Flora's."  A  wild 
hope  flashed  in  me  that  maybe  he  was  going  and  I 
should  be  rid  of  him. 

"Oh,  I  don't  care  much  for  that  crowd.  I  told 
her  I  had  an  engagement  with  you."  So  he  had 


110  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

known  I  was  not  to  be.  invited.  I  resented  the 
liberty  of  his  defence.  "Let's  go  down  to  Niles's 
and  have  some  ice  cream,"  Tommy  propitiated. 

"It's  too  cold  for  ice  cream."  I  led  the  way  back 
to  the  house.  I  was  satisfied  there  was  no  one  in  the 
street.  When  we  stepped  into  the  fan  of  light  from 
the  lit  window,  Tommy  saw  my  face. 

"Oh,  I  say,  Ollie,  you  mustn't  take  it  like  that. 
Beastly  cats  girls  are!  Flora's  just  jealous  because 
she  thought  she  was  invited  to  the  picnic  for  that 
Garrett  chap,  and  you  got  him;  she  wants  to  have 
a  chance  at  him  herself  to-night."  There  was  a 
green-painted  garden  seat  on  the  porch  between  the 
front  windows.  I  sat  down  in  it. 

"It 'snot  Flora  I'm  crying  about  .  .  .  it  is  being  so 
misunderstood."  I  was  thinking  that  Helmeth  Gar 
rett  would  suppose  I  had  stayed  away  from  Flora's 
on  his  account;  she  would  never  dare  to  say  she  had 
not  invited  me.  Tommy's  arm  came  comfortingly 
along  the  back  of  the  bench. 

"It's  just  because  they  do  understand  that  they 
are  mad;  they  know  a  fellow  would  give  his  eyes  to 
kiss  you.  Infernal  cad!  to  snatch  it  like  that;  and 
I've  never  even  asked  you  for  one."  His  voice  was 
very  close  to  my  ear.  "I  tell  you,  Olivia,  I've 
thought  of  something.  If  you  were  to  be  engaged 
to  me  .  .  .  you  know  I've  always  wanted  .  .  .  then 
nobody  would  have  a  right  to  say  anything.  They'd 
see  that  you  just  left  it  to  me." 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  111 

"Oh,"  I  blurted,  "it's  not  so  bad  as  that!'5 

"You  think  about  it,"  he  urged.  "I  don't  want 
to  bother  you,  but  if  you  need  it,  why  here  I  am." 
It  was  because  I  was  thinking  of  him  so  little  that  I 
hadn't  noticed  where  Tommy's  arm  had  got  by  this 
time.  That  unfulfilled  kiss  had  seemed  somehow 
to  leave  me  unimaginably  exposed,  assailed.  I  was 
needing  desperately  then  to  be  kissed  again,  to  find 
myself  revalued. 

"It's  awfully  good  of  you,  Tommy  .  .  .  ." 

I  do  not  know  how  it  was  that  neither  of  us  heard 
Forester  come  up  from  the  gate;  all  at  once  there  was 
his  foot  on  the  step;  as  he  came  into  the  porch  a  soft 
sound  drew  him,  he  stared  blankly  on  us  for  a  mo 
ment  and  then  laughed  shortly. 

"Oh!  it's  you  this  time,  Bettersworth.  I  thought 
it  might  be  that  Garrett  chap." 

That  was  unkind  of  Forester,  but  there  were  ex 
tenuations.  I  found  afterward  that  Belle  had  teased 
Flora  to  ask  him  and  he  had  refused,  thinking  it 
unbrotherly  when  I  was  not  to  be  invited,  and  he 
and  Belle  had  quarrelled. 

"I  don't  know  as  it  matters  to  you"  —  Tommy 
was  valiant  —  "whom  she  kisses,  if  I  don't  mind  it." 

"You?    What  have  you  got  to  do  with  it?' ' 

"Well,  a  lot.     I'm  engaged  to  her." 


BOOK  II 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  first  notion  of  an  obligation  I  had  in  writing  this 
part  of  my  story,  was  that  if  it  is  to  be  serviceable,  no 
lingering  sentiment  should  render  it  less  than  literal, 
and  none  of  that  egotism  turned  inside  out  which 
makes  a  kind  sanctity  of  the  personal  experience, 
prevent  me  from  offering  it  whole.  And  the  next 
was  that  the  only  way  in  which  it  could  be  made  to 
appear  in  its  complete  pitiableness,  would  be  to  write 
it  from  the  point  of  view  of  Tommy  Bettersworth. 
For  after  all,  I  have  emerged  —  retarded,  crippled 
in  my  affectional  capacities,  bodily  the  worse,  but 
still  with  wings  to  spread  and  some  disposition 
toward  flying.  And  when  I  think  of  the  dreams 
Tommy  had,  how  he  must  have  figured  in  them  to 
himself,  large  between  me  and  all  misadventure, 
adored,  dependable;  and  then  how  he  blundered  and 
lost  himself  in  the  mazes  of  unsuitability,  I  find  bit 
terness  augmenting  in  me  not  on  my  account  but  his. 
The  amazing  pity  of  it  was  that  it  might  all  have 
turned  out  very  well  if  I  had  been  what  I  seemed  to 
him  and  to  my  family  at  the  time  when  I  let  him 
engage  himself  to  me  to  save  me  from  immanent 
embarrassment. 

My  mother,  though  she  took  on  for  the  occasion 

115 


116  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

an  appropriate  solemnity,  was  frankly  relieved  to 
have  me  so  well  disposed.  Tommy  had  been  brought 
up  in  the  church,  had  no  bad  habits,  and  was  earning 
a  reasonable  salary  with  Burton  Brothers,  Tailors  and 
Outfitters. 

There  was  nobody  whose  business  it  was  to  tell 
me  that  I  did  not  love  Tommy  enough  to  marry  him. 
I  have  often  wondered,  supposing  a  medium  of 
communication  had  been  established  between  my 
mother  and  me,  if  I  had  told  her  how  much  more  that 
other  kiss  had  meant  to  me  than  Tommy's  mild 
osculation,  she  would  have  understood  or  made  a 
fight  for  me?  I  am  afraid  she  would  only  have  seen 
in  it  evidence  of  an  infatuation  for  an  undesirable 
young  man,  one  who  smoked  and  drove  rakishly 
about  town  in  red  neckties  on  Sunday  morning. 
But  in  fact  I  liked  Tommy  immensely.  The  mating 
instinct  was  awake;  all  our  world  clapped  us  for 
ward  to  the  adventure. 

If  you  ask  what  the  inward  monitor  was  about  on 
this  occasion,  I  will  say  that  it  is  always  and  singu 
larly  inept  at  human  estimates.  If,  often  in  search 
of  companionship,  its  eye  is  removed  from  the  Mark, 
to  fix  upon  the  personal  environment,  it  is  still  un 
furnished  to  divine  behind  which  plain  exterior  lives 
another  like  itself!  I  took  Tommy's  community  of 
interest  for  granted  on  the  evidence  of  his  loving  me, 
though,  indeed,  after  all  these  years  I  am  not  quite 
clear  why  he,  why  Forester  and  Pauline  couldn't 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  117 

have  walked  in  the  way  with  me  toward  the  Shining 
Destiny.  I  was  not  conscious  of  any  private  advan 
tage;  certainly  so  far  as  our  beginnings  were  con 
cerned,  none  showed,  and  I  should  have  been  glad  of 
their  company . . .  and  here  at  the  end  I  am  walking 
in  it  alone. 

About  a  month  after  my  engagement,  Henry  Mills 
proposed  to  Pauline,  and  she  began  preparations 
to  be  married  the  following  June.  Tommy's  salary 
not  being  thought  to  justify  it  so  soon,  the  idea  of  my 
own  marriage  had  not  come  very  close  to  me  until  I 
began  to  help  Pauline  work  initials  on  table  linen. 

The  chief  difference  between  Pauline  and  me  had 
been  that  she  had  lived  all  her  life,  so  to  speak,  at 
home;  nothing  exigent  to  her  social  order  had  ever 
found  her  "out";  but  Olivia  seemed  always  to  be  at 
the  top  of  the  house  or  somewhere  in  the  back  gar 
den,  to  whom  the  normal  occasions  presented  them 
selves  as  a  succession  of  cards  under  the  door.  I 
do  not  mean  to  say  that  I  actually  missed  any  of 
these  appointed  visitors,  but  all  my  early  life  comes 
back  to  me  as  a  series  of  importunate  callers  whose 
names  I  was  not  sure  of,  and  who  distracted  me  fright 
fully  from  something  vastly  more  pleasant  and  im 
portant  that  I  wanted  very  much  to  do,  without 
knowing  very  well  what  it  was.  But  it  was  in  the 
long  afternoons  when  Pauline  and  I  sat  upstairs 
together  sewing  on  our  white  things  that  I  began  to 
take  notice  of  the  relation  of  what  happened  to  me 


118  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

to  the  things  that  went  on  inside,  and  to  be  intrigued 
away  from  the  Vision  by  the  possibility  of  turning  it 
into  facts  of  line  and  colour  and  suitability.  It  was 
the  beginning  of  my  realizing  what  came  afterward 
to  be  such  a  bitter  and  engrossing  need  with  me, 
the  need  of  money. 

Much  that  had  struck  inharmoniously  on  me  in 
the  furnishings  of  Taylorville,  had  identified  itself 
so  with  the  point  of  view  there,  that  I  had  come  to 
think  of  the  one  as  being  the  natural  and  inevitable 
expression  of  the  other;  now,  with  the  growing  ap 
preciation  of  a  home  of  my  own  as  a  medium  of  self- 
realization,  I  accepted  its  possibility  of  limitation  by 
the  figure  of  my  husband's  income  without  being 
entirely  daunted  thereby.  For  I  was  still  of  the 
young  opinion  that  getting  rich  involved  no  more 
serious  matter  than  setting  about  it.  As  I  saw  it 
then,  Men's  Tailoring  and  Outfitting  did  not  appear 
an  unlikely  beginning;  if  Tommy  had  achieved  the 
magnificence  I  planned  for  him,  it  wouldn't  have 
been  on  the  whole  more  remarkable  than  what  has 
happened.  What  I  had  to  reckon  with  later  was 
the  astonishing  fact  that  Tommy  liked  plush  furni 
ture,  and  liked  it  red  for  choice. 

I  do  not  know  why  it  should  have  taken  me  by 
surprise  to  find  him  in  harmony  with  his  bringing 
up;  there  was  no  reason  for  the  case  being  other 
wise  except  as  I  seemed  to  find  one  in  his  being 
fond  of  me.  His  mother's  house  was  not  unlike 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  119 

other  Taylorvillian  homes,  more  austerely  kept;  the 
blinds  were  always  pulled  down  in  the  best  room,  and 
they  never  opened  the  piano  except  when  there  was 
company,  or  for  the  little  girls  to  practise  their  music 
lessons.  Mrs.  Betters  worth  was  a  large,  fair  woman 
with  pale,  prominent  eyes,  and  pale  hair  pulled  back 
from  a  corrugated  forehead,  and  his  sisters,  who  were 
all  younger  than  Tommy,  were  exactly  like  her,  their 
eyes  if  possible  more  protruded,  which  you  felt  to  be 
owing  to  their  hair  being  braided  very  tightly  in  two 
braids  as  far  apart  as  possible  at  the  corners  of  their 
heads. 

They  treated  me  always  with  the  greatest  respect. 
If  there  had  been  anybody  who  could  have  thrown 
any  light  on  the  situation  it  would  have  been  Mr. 
Bettersworth.  He  was  a  dry  man,  with  what  passed 
in  Taylorville  for  an  eccentric  turn  of  mind.  He  had, 
for  instance,  been  known  to  justify  himself  for  put 
ting  Tommy  to  the  Men's  Outfitters  rather  than  to 
his  own  business  of  building  and  contracting,  on  the 
ground  that  Tommy  wanted  the  imagination  for  it. 
Just  as  if  an  imagination  could  be  of  use  to  anybody! 

"So  you  are  going  to  undertake  to  make  Tommy 
happy?"  he  said  to  me  on  the  occasion  of  my  taking 
supper  with  the  family  as  a  formal  acknowledgment 
of  my  engagement. 

"Don't  you  think  I  can  do  it?"  He  was  looking 
at  me  rather  quizzically,  and  I  really  wished  to  know. 

"Oh!  I  was  wondering,"  he  said,  "what  you  would 


120  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

do  with  what  you  had  left  over."    But  it  was  years 
before  I  understood  what  he  meant  by  that. 

About  the  time  I  was  bridesmaid  for  Pauline, 
Tommy  had  an  advantageous  offer  that  put  our  mar 
riage  almost  immediately  within  reach.  Burton 
Brothers  was  a  branch  house,  one  of  a  score  with  the 
Head  at  Chicago,  to  whom  Tommy  had  so  com 
mended  himself  under  the  stimulus  of  being  engaged, 
that  on  the  establishment  of  a  new  store  in  Higgle- 
ston  they  offered  him  the  sales  department.  There 
was  also  to  be  a  working  tailor  and  a  superintendent 
visiting  it  regularly  from  Chicago,  which  its  nearness 
to  the  metropolis  allowed. 

All  that  we  knew  of  Higgleston  was  that  it  was  a 
long  settled  farming  community,  which,  having  dis 
covered  itself  at  the  junction  of  two  railway  lines 
that  approached  Chicago  from  the  southeast,  con 
ceived  itself  to  have  arrived  there  by  some  native 
superiority,  and  awoke  to  the  expectation  of  impor 
tance. 

It  lay,  as  respects  Taylorville,  no  great  distance 
beyond  the  flat  horizon  of  the  north,  where  the  prairie 
broke  into  wooded  land  again,  far  enough  north  not 
to  have  been  fanned  by  the  hot  blast  of  the  war  and 
the  spiritual  struggle  that  preceded  it,  and  so  to  have 
missed  the  revitalizing  processes  that  crowded  the 
few  succeeding  years.  Whatever  difference  there 
was  between  it  and  Taylorville  besides  population, 
was  just  the  difference  between  a  community  that 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  121 

has  fought  whole-heartedly  and  one  that  stood  look 
ing  on  at  the  fight. 

It  was  not  far  enough  from  Taylorville  to  have 
struck  out  anything  new  for  itself  in  manners  or 
furniture,  but  the  necessity  of  going  south  two  or 
three  hours  to  change  cars,  and  north  again  several 
hours  more,  set  up  an  illusion  of  change  which  led 
to  a  disappointment  in  its  want  of  variety.  Tommy 
went  out  in  July,  and  in  a  month  wrote  me  that  he 
would  be  able  to  come  for  me  as  soon  as  I  was  ready, 
and  hoping  it  would  not  be  long.  If  I  had  looked, 
as  in  the  last  hesitancies  of  girlhood  I  believe  I  did, 
for  my  mother  to  have  raised  an  objection  to  my  go 
ing  so  far  from  home,  I  found  myself,  instead,  almost 
with  the  feeling  of  being  pushed  out  of  the  nest.  It 
seemed  as  if  in  hastening  me  out  of  the  family  she 
would  be  the  sooner  free  to  give  herself  without  re 
proach  to  a  new  and  extraordinary  scheme  of  For 
ester's.  What  I  guess  now  to  have  been  in  part  the 
motive,  was  that  she  already  had  been  touched  by 
the  warning  of  that  disorder  which  finally  carried 
her  off,  which,  with  the  curious  futility  of  timid 
women,  she  hoped,  by  not  mentioning,  to  postpone. 

For  a  long  time  now  Forester  had  found  himself 
in  the  situation  of  having  grown  beyond  his  virtues. 
That  assumption  of  mannishness  which  sat  so  pret 
tily  on  his  nonage  was  rendered  inconspicuous  by 
his  majority.  People  who  had  forgotten  that  he 
had  never  had  any  boyhood,  found  nothing  especially 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

commendable  in  the  mild  soberness  of  twenty- three. 
I  have  a  notion,  too,  that  the  happy  circumstance  of 
my  marriage  lit  up  for  him  some  personal  phases 
which  he  could  hardly  have  regarded  with  compla 
cence,  for  by  this  time  he  had  passed,  in  his  character 
of  philanderer,  from  being  hopefully  regarded  as 
reclaimable  to  constancy,  to  a  sort  of  public  under 
study  in  the  practice  of  the  affections.  However  it 
had  come  about,  the  young  ladies  who  still  took  on 
Forester  at  intervals,  no  longer  looked  on  him  so 
much  as  privileged  but  as  eminently  safe;  and  the 
number  of  girls  in  a  given  community  who  can  be 
counted  on  for  such  a  performance,  is  limited.  That 
summer  before  I  was  married,  after  Belle  Endsleigh 
had  run  away  from  home  with  a  commercial  travel 
ler  who  disappointed  the  moral  instance  by  making 
her  a  very  good  husband  afterward,  my  brother 
found  himself,  as  regards  the  young  people's  world, 
in  a  situation  of  uneasy  detachment.  And  there 
was  no  doubt  that  the  Cooperative,  where  he  had 
been  seven  years,  bored  him  excessively.  It  was 
then  he  conceived  the  idea  of  reinstating  himself  in 
the  atmosphere  of  importance  by  setting  himself  up 
in  business. 

Adjacent  to  Niles's  Ice  Cream  Parlours,  there  was 
a  small  stationery  and  news  agency  which  might 
be  bought  and  enlarged  to  creditable  proportions. 
There  was,  I  believe,  actually  nothing  to  be  urged 
against  this  as  a  matter  of  business;  the  difficulty  was 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  123 

that  to  accomplish  it  my  mother  would  be  obliged 
to  hypothecate  the  whole  of  her  small  capital.  What 
my  mother  really  thought  about  her  property  was 
that  she  held  it  in  trust  for  the  family  interest,  and 
that,  with  the  secret  intimation  of  her  end  which 
I  surmise  must  have  reached  her  by  this  time,  she 
believed  to  be  served  by  Forester's  plan.  It  was  so 
much  the  general  view  that  by  marrying  I  took  my 
self  out  of  the  family  altogether,  that  I  felt  convinced 
that  she  meant,  so  soon  as  that  was  accomplished,  to 
undertake  what,  in  the  face  of  my  protesting  attitude, 
she  had  not  the  courage  to  begin.  I  remember  how 
shocked  she  was  at  my  telling  her  that  this  tying  up 
of  the  two  ends  of  life  in  a  monetary  obligation,  would 
put  her  and  Forester  very  much  in  the  situation  of  a 
young  man  married  to  a  middle-aged  woman.  I 
mention  this  here  because  the  implication  that  grew 
out  of  it,  of  my  marriage  being  looked  forward  to  as 
a  relief,  had  much  to  do  with  the  failure  out  of  my 
life  at  this  juncture,  of  informing  intimacy. 

A  great  deal  of  necessary  information  had  come 
my  way  through  Pauline's  marriage,  through  the 
comment  set  free  by  Belle  Endsleigh's  affair,  through 
the  natural  awakening  of  my  mind  toward  the  inti 
mations  of  books.  Marriage  I  began  to  perceive 
as  an  engulfing  personal  experience.  Until  now  I 
hadn't  been  able  to  think  of  it  except  as  a  means 
of  providing  pleasant  companionship  on  the  way 
toward  that  large  and  shining  world  for  which  I  felt 


124  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

myself  forever  and  unassailably  fit.  It  began  to  ex 
hibit  now,  through  vistas  that  allured,  the  aspect 
of  a  vast  inhuman  gin.  Somewhere  out  of  this 
prospect  of  sympathy  and  understanding,  arose  upon 
you  the  tremendous  inundation  of  Life.  Dimly 
beyond  the  point  of  Tommy's  joyous  possession  of 
me,  I  was  aware  of  an  incalculable  Force  by  which 
the  whole  province  of  my  being  was  assailed,  very 
different  from  the  girlish  prevision  of  motherhood 
which  had  floated  with  the  fragrance  of  orris  root 
from  Aunt  Alice's  bureau  drawer  in  the  Allingham's 
spare  room. 

I  don't  say  this  is  the  way  all  girls  feel  about  the 
approach  of  maternity,  but  I  saw  it  then  like  the  wolf 
in  the  fairy  tale,  which  as  soon  as  its  head  was  ad 
mitted,  thrust  in  a  shoulder  and  so  came  bodily  into 
the  room  and  devoured  the  protestant.  Long  after 
ward,  when  I  was  in  a  position  to  know  something 
of  the  private  experience  of  trapeze  performers,  I 
learned  that  they  came  to  a  point  sometimes  in  mid- 
spring  when  the  body  apprised  them  of  inadequacy, 
a  warning  sure  to  be  followed  in  no  long  time  by  dis 
aster.  I  have  thought  sometimes  that  what  reached 
me  then  was  the  advice  of  a  body  instinctively  aware 
of  being  unequal  to  the  demands  about  to  be  imposed 
upon  it. 

I  hardly  know  now  by  what  road  I  arrived  at  the 
certainty  that  some  women,  Pauline  for  instance, 
were  able  to  face  this  looming  terror  of  childbearing 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  125 

by  making  terms  with  it.  Life,  it  appeared,  waited 
at  their  doors  with  respect,  modified  the  edge  of  its 
inevitableness  to  their  convenience.  If  Pauline  had 
been  accessible  —  but  she  was  living  in  Chicago  with 
Henry  Mills,  going  out  a  great  deal,  and  writing  me 
infrequent  letters  of  bright  complacency.  It  was 
only  in  the  last  frightened  gasp  I  fixed  upon  my 
mother.  You  must  imagine  for  yourself  from  what 
you  know  of  nice  girls  thirty  years  ago,  how  inarticu 
late  the  whole  business  was;  the  most  I  can  do  is  to 
have  you  understand  my  desperate  need  to  know, 
to  interpose  between  marriage  and  maternity  never 
so  slight  an  interval  in  which  to  collect  myself  and 
leave  off  shrinking. 

About  a  week  before  my  wedding  we  were  sitting 
together  at  the  close  of  the  afternoon;  my  mother 
had  taken  up  her  knitting,  as  her  habit  was  when  the 
light  failed.  Something  in  the  work  we  had  been 
doing,  putting  the  last  touches  to  my  wedding  dress, 
led  her  to  speak  of  her  own,  and  of  my  father  as  a 
young  man.  The  mention  pricked  me  to  notice 
what  I  recall  now  as  characteristic  of  Taylorville 
women,  that,  with  all  she  had  been  through,  the  war, 
her  eight  children,  so  many  graves,  there  was  still, 
in  her  attitude  toward  all  these,  a  kind  of  untutored 
virginity.  It  made,  my  noticing  it  then  and  being 
touched  by  it,  a  sort  of  bridge  by  which  it  seemed  for 
the  moment  she  might  be  drawn  over  to  my  side. 
On  the  impulse  I  spoke. 


126  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Mother,"  I  said,  "I  want  to  know ?" 

It  seemed  a  natural  sort  of  knowledge  to  which  any 
woman  had  a  right.  Almost  before  the  question 
was  out  I  saw  the  expression  of  offended  shock  come 
over  my  mother's  reminiscent  softness,  the  nearly 
animal  rage  of  terror  with  which  the  unknown,  the 
unaccustomed,  assailed  her. 

"Olivia!  Olivia!"  She  stood  up,  her  knitting 
rigid  in  her  hands,  the  ball  of  it  speeding  away  in  the 
dusk  of  the  floor  on  some  private  terror  of  its  own. 
"Olivia,  I'll  not  hear  of  such  things!  You  are  not 
to  speak  of  them,  do  you  understand!  I'll  have 
nothing  to  do  with  them!" 

"I  wanted  to  know,"  I  said.  "I  thought  you 
could  tell  me  .  .  .  ." 

I  went  over  and  stood  by  the  window;  a  little 
dry  snow  was  blowing  —  it  was  the  first  week  in 
November  —  beginning  to  collect  on  the  edges  of 
the  walks  and  along  the  fences;  the  landscape  showed 
sketched  in  white  on  a  background  of  neutral  gray. 
I  heard  a  movement  in  the  room  behind  me;  my 
mother  came  presently  and  stood  looking  out  with 
me.  She  was  very  pale,  scared  but  commiserating. 
Somehow  my  question  had  glanced  in  striking  the 
dying  nerve  of  long  since  encountered  dreads  and 
pains.  We  faced  them  together  there  in  the  cold 
twilight. 

"I'm  sorry,  daughter" — she  hesitated — "I  can't 
help  you.  I  don't  know  ...  I  never  knew  myself." 


CHAPTER  H 

IT  is  no  doubt  owing  to  the  habit  of  life  in  Higgle- 
ston  being  so  little  differentiated  from  Taylorville 
that  I  was  never  able  to  get  any  other  impression  of 
it  than  as  a  place  one  put  up  at  on  the  way  to  some 
other;  always  it  bore  to  my  mind  the  air  of  a  travel 
ler's  room  in  one  of  those  stops  where  it  is  necessary 
to  open  the  trunks  but  not  worth  while  to  unpack 
them.  Nor  do  I  think  it  was  altogether  owing  to 
what  I  left  there  that  my  recollection  of  it  centres 
paganly  about  the  cemetery.  In  Taylorville,  love 
and  birth,  though  but  scantily  removed  from  the 
savour  of  impropriety,  were  still  the  salient  facts  of 
existence,  but  in  Higgleston  a  funeral  was  your  real 
human  occasion.  It  was  as  if  the  rural  fear  of  inno 
vation  had  thrown  them  back  for  a  pivotal  centre 
upon  the  point  of  continuity  with  their  past. 

It  was  a  generous  rolling  space  set  aside  for  the 
dead,  abutting  on  two  sides  on  the  boardwalks  of 
the  town,  stretching  back  by  dips  and  hollows  to 
the  wooded  pastures.  Near  the  gates  which  opened 
from  the  walk,  it  was  divided  off  in  single  plots  and 
family  allotments,  scattering  more  and  more  to  the 
farthest  neglected  mounds  that  crept  obscurely  under 
the  hazel  thickets  and  the  sapling  oaks,  happiest 

127 


128  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

when  named  the  least,  assimilated  quickliest  to  their 
native  earth,  It  was  this  that  rendered  the  pagan 
touch,  for  though  nearly  all  Higgleston  was  church- 
going  and  looked  forward  to  a  hymn-book  heaven, 
they  seemed  to  me  never  quite  dissevered  from  the 
untutored  pastures  to  which  their  whole  living  and 
dying  was  a  process  of  being  reabsorbed. 

Higgleston,  until  this  junction  of  railroads  occurred, 
had  been  a  close  settled  farming  community.  A 
vague  notion  of  civic  improvement  had  ripped  through 
the  centre  of  its  wide  old  yards  and  comfortable,  coun 
try  looking  dwellings,  a  shadeless,  unpaved  street 
lined  with  what  were  known  as  business  blocks,  with 
a  tendency  to  run  mostly  to  front  and  a  general 
placarded  state  of  being  to  let,  or  about  to  be  opened 
on  these  premises. 

Beyond  the  railway  station  there  was  a  dingy  re 
gion  devoted  to  car  shops  and  cheap  lodgings,  known 
locally  as  Track  Town,  whose  inhabitants  were  for 
ever  at  odds  with  the  older  rural  population,  with 
drawing  itself  into  a  kind  of  aristocracy  of  priority 
and  propriety.  Between  these  lay  an  intermediary 
group,  self  styled,  "the  leading  business  men  of  the 
town,"  forever  and  trivially  busy  to  reconcile  the 
two  factions  in  the  interests  of  trade.  That  Tommy 
was  by  reason  of  his  position  as  managing  salesman 
of  Burton  Brothers,  generically  of  this  class,  might 
have  had  something  to  do  with  my  never  having 
formed  any  vital  or  lasting  relations  with  either  com- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  129 

munity;  and  it  might  have  been  for  quite  other 
reasons.  For  in  the  very  beginning  of  my  stay  there, 
Life  had  seized  me;  that  bubbling,  frothing  Force, 
working  forever  to  breach  the  film  of  existence.  I 
was  used  by  it,  I  was  abused  by  it.  For  what 
does  Life  care  what  it  does  to  the  tender  bodies  of 
women? 

My  baby  was  born  within  ten  months  of  my  mar 
riage  and  most  of  that  time  I  was  wretchedly,  de- 
pressingly  ill.  All  my  memories  of  my  early  married 
life  are  of  Olivia,  in  the  mornings  still  with  frost, 
cowering  away  from  the  kitchen  sights  and  smells, 
or  gasping  up  out  of  ingulfing  nausea  to  sit  out  the 
duty  calls  of  the  leading  ladies  of  Higgleston  in  the 
cold,  disordered  house;  of  Tommy  gulping  unsuit 
able  meals  of  underdone  and  overdone  things,  and 
washing  the  day's  accumulation  of  dishes  after 
business  hours,  patient  and  portentously  cheer 
ful,  with  Olivia  in  a  wrapper,  half  hysterical  with 
weakness  —  all  the  young  wife's  dreams  gone  awry! 
And  Tommy  too,  he  must  have  had  visions  of  him 
self  coming  home  to  a  well-kept  house,  of  delicious 
little  dinners  and  long  hours  in  which  he  should  ap 
pear  in  his  proper  character  as  the  adored,  achieving 
male.  Not  long  ago  I  read  a  book  of  a  man's  life 
written  by  a  man,  in  which  he  justified  himself  of 
unfaithfulness  because  his  wife  appeared  before  him 
habitually  in  curl  papers  —  and  there  were  days 
when  I  couldn't  even  do  my  hair! 


130  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

In  the  beginning  we  had  taken,  in  respect  to  Tom 
my's  position  among  those  same  live  business  men, 
a  house  rather  too  large  for  us,  and  we  hadn't  counted 
on  the  wages  of  a  servant.  Now  with  the  necessity 
upon  us  of  laying  by  money  for  the  Great  Expense, 
we  felt  less  justified  in  it  than  ever.  This  pinch  of 
necessity  was  of  the  quality  of  corrosion  on  what  must 
have  been  meant  for  the  consummate  experience.  I 
have  to  dwell  on  it  here  because  in  this  practical  con 
fusion  of  my  illness,  was  laid  the  foundation  of  our  later 
failure  to  come  together  on  any  working  basis.  We 
hadn't,  in  fact,  time  to  find  it;  no  time  to  understand, 
none  whatever  in  which  to  explore  the  use  of  passion 
and  react  into  that  superunion  of  which  the  bodily 
relation  is  the  overt  sign.  Young  things  we  were, 
who  had  not  fairly  known  each  other  as  man  and 
woman  before  we  were  compelled  to  trace  in  one 
another  the  lineaments  of  parents,  all  attention 
drawn  away  from  the  imperative  business  of  framing 
a  common  ideal,  to  centre  on  the  child. 

What  this  precipitance  accomplished  was,  that,  in 
stead  of  being  drawn  insensibly  to  find  in  the  exigen 
cies  of  marriage  the  natural  unfolding  of  that  in 
ward  vitality,  always  much  stronger  in  me  than  any 
exterior  phase,  I  was  by  the  shock  of  too  early  ma 
ternity  driven  apart  from  the  usual,  and  I  still  be 
lieve  the  happier,  destiny  of  women. 

With  all  this  we  were  spared  the  bitterness  of  the 
unwelcoming  thought.  Little  homely  memories 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  131 

swim  up  beyond  the  pains  and  depressions  to  mark, 
like  twigs  and  leafage  on  a  freshet,  the  swelling  of 
the  new  affection:  Effie  at  Montecito,  overruling  all 
my  mother's  shocked  suggestions  as  to  her  supposed 
obliviousness  of  my  condition,  sitting  up  nights  to 
sew  for  me  .  .  .  the  dress  I  tried  to  make  myself 
.  .  .  the  bureau  drawer  from  which  I  used  to  take 
the  little  things  every  night  to  look  at  them  .  .  . 
the  smell  of  orris. 

"See,  Tommy;  I've  done  so  much  to-day.  Isn't 
it  pretty?" 

"My  dear,  you've  shown  that  to  me  at  least  forty 
times  and  I've  always  said  so." 

"Yes,  but  isn't  it  ?  ...  the  little  sleeves  .  .  . 
did  you  think  anything  could  be  so  small?  Tommy, 
don't  you  wish  it  would  come?" 

We  had  to  make  what  we  could  of  these  moments 
of  thrilled  expectancy,  of  tender  brooding  curiosity. 

I  scarcely  recall  now  all  the  reasons  why  it  was 
thought  best  for  me  to  go  back  to  my  mother  in 
August,  and  to  the  family  physician,  but  I  find  it  all 
pertinent  to  my  subject.  Whatever  was  done  there 
was  mostly  wrong,  though  I  was  years  finding  it  out. 
I  mean  that  whatever  chance  I  had  of  growing  up 
into  the  competent  mother  of  a  family  was  probably 
lost  to  me  through  the  inexactitudes  of  country 
practice.  We  hadn't  then  arrived  at  the  realiza 
tion  that  the  well  or  ill  going  of  maternity  is  a  matter 
of  sepsis  rather  than  sentiment.  Taylorville  was 


132  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

a  town  of  ten  thousand  inhabitants,  but  at  that  time 
no  one  had  heard  of  such  a  thing  as  a  trained  nurse; 
the  business  of  midwifery  was  given  over  in  general 
to  a  widow  so  little  attractive  that  she  was  thought 
not  to  have  a  chance  of  marrying  again,  and  by  the 
circumstance  of  having  had  two  or  three  children  of 
her  own,  believed  to  be  eminently  fit.  To  Olivia's 
first  encounter  with  the  rending  powers  of  Life, 
there  went  any  amount  of  affectionate  consideration 
and  much  old  wives'  lore  of  an  extraordinary  char 
acter.  It  seems  hardly  credible  now,  but  in  the 
beginning  of  things  going  wrong,  there  were  symp 
toms  concealed  from  the  doctor  on  the  ground  of 
delicacy. 

My  baby,  too,  poor  little  man,  was  feeble  from 
birth,  a  bottle  baby;  the  best  that  could  have  been 
done  would  hardly  have  been  a  chance  for  him. 
Lying  there  in  the  hot,  close  room,  all  the  air  shut 
out  with  the  light,  in  the  midst  of  pains,  I  made  a 
fight  for  him,  tried  to  interpose  such  scraps  of  better 
knowledge  as  had  come  to  me  through  reading,  but 
they  made  no  headway  against  my  mother's  con 
fident,  "Well,  I  ought  to  know,  I've  buried  five," 
and  against  Forester,  who  by  the  added  importance 
of  having  invested  all  her  fortune,  had  gained  such 
way  with  my  mother  that  she  listened  respectfully 
to  his  explication  of  what  should  be  done  for  the 
baby.  It  was  Forester  who  overbore  with  ridicule 
my  suggestion  that  he  should  be  fed  at  regular  hours, 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  133 

for  which  I  never  forgave  him.  But  I  had  enough 
to  do  to  fortify  my  racked  body  against  the  time 
when  I  should  be  obliged  to  get  up  and  go  on  again, 
as  it  seemed  privately  I  never  should  be  able. 

And  they  were  all  so  fond  and  proud  of  my  little 
Thomas  Henry  —  he  was  named  so  for  his  father  and 
mine  —  Effie  simply  adored  him;  the  wonder  of  his 
smallness,  the  way  in  which  he  moved  his  limbs  and 
opened  and  shut  his  eyes;  quite  as  if  there  had  never 
been  one  born  before.  The  way  they  hung  over  him, 
and  the  wrong  things  they  did!  Even  Cousin  Lydia 
drove  into  church  the  first  Sunday  after,  for  the  pur 
pose  of  holding  him  for  a  quarter  of  an  hour  in  her 
large,  silk  poplin  arms,  at  the  end  of  which  time  she 
had  softened  almost  to  the  point  of  confidence. 

"I  thought  I  was  going  to  have  one  once,"  she 
admitted,  "but  somehow  I  couldn't  seem  to  manage 
it."  She  looked  over  to  where  Cousin  Judd  sat 
with  my  mother.  "He  was  always  fond  of  young 
ones.  .  .  ."  It  occurred  to  me  then  that  Cousin 
Lydia  was  probably  a  much  misunderstood  woman. 

Of  the  next  six  months  at  Higgleston,  after  I  re 
turned  to  it  with  a  three  months'  old  baby,  I  have 
scarcely  any  recollection  that  is  not  mixed  up  with 
bodily  torment  for  myself  and  anxiety  for  the  child. 
I  think  it  probable  that  most  of  that  time  my  hus 
band  found  the  house  badly  kept,  the  meals  irregular 
and  his  wife  hysterical.  I  hadn't  anything  to  spare 
with  which  to  consider  what  figure  I  might  have  cut 


134  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

in  the  eyes  of  the  onlooker.  Tommy  shines  out  for 
me  in  that  period  by  reason  of  the  unwearying  pa 
tience  and  cheerfulness  with  which  he  successfully 
ignored  the  general  unsatisfactoriness  of  his  home, 
and  at  times  for  a  certain  exasperation  I  had  with 
him,  as  if  by  being  somehow  less  quiescent  he  might 
have  opposed  a  better  front  to  the  encroachments  of 
distress.  We  did  try  help  in  the  kitchen  after  our 
finances  had  a  little  recovered  from  the  strain  of  my 
confinement,  a  Higgleston  girl  of  no  very  great  com 
petence  and  a  sort  of  back-door  visiting  acquaint 
ance  with  two  thirds  of  the  community.  Her  chief 
accomplishments  while  she  stayed  with  us,  were  con 
cocted  out  of  the  scraps  and  fag  ends  of  our  private 
conversations.  I  could  always  tell  that  Ida  had 
overheard  something  by  the  alacrity  with  which  she 
banged  the  pots  about  in  the  kitchen  in  order  that 
she  might  get  through  with  her  work  and  go  out  and 
tell  somebody.  In  the  end  Tommy  said  that  when  it 
came  to  a  choice  between  getting  his  own  meals  and 
losing  his  best  customers  he  preferred  the  former. 

All  this  time  I  did  not  know  how  ill  I  was  because 
of  the  consuming  anxiety  for  the  baby.  I  remember 
times  in  the  night  —  the  dreadful  momentary  revolt 
of  my  body  rousing  to  this  new  demand  upon  it,  be 
fore  the  mind  waked  to  the  selfless  consideration; 
and  the  failure  of  composure  which  was  as  much 
•weakness  as  fear;  the  long  watching,  the  walking  to 
and  fro,  and  the  debates  as  to  whether  we  ought  or 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  135 

ought  not  to  venture  on  the  expense  of  the  doctor. 
And  for  long  years  afterward  what  is  the  bitterest  of 
bitterness,  finding  out  that  we  had  done  the  wrong 
thing.  To  this  day  I  cannot  come  across  any  notices 
of  the  more  competent  methods  for  the  care  of  deli 
cate  children,  without  a  remembering  pang. 

All  the  time  this  was  going  on  I  was  aware  by  a 
secondary  detached  sort  of  self,  that  there  was  a  point 
somewhere  beyond  this  perplexity  of  pain,  at  which 
the  joyful  possession  of  my  son  should  begin.  I  was 
anxious  to  get  at  him,  to  have  speech  with  him,  to 
realize  his  identity  —  any  woman  will  understand  — 
and  along  about  the  time  the  blue  flags  and  the  live- 
for-evers  and  the  white  bridal  wreaths  were  at  their 
best  in  the  cemetery,  it  came  upon  me  terrifyingly 
that  I  might,  after  all,  have  to  let  him  go  without  it. 
We  were  walking  there  that  day,  the  first  we  had 
thought  it  safe  to  take  the  baby  out,  for  it  was  cus 
tomary  to  walk  in  the  cemetery  on  Sunday  and  almost 
obligatory  to  your  social  standing.  The  oaks  were 
budding,  and  the  wind  in  the  irises  and  the  shadow  of 
them  on  the  tombstones,  and  the  people  all  in  their 
Sunday  best,  walking  in  the  warm  light,  gave  an 
effect  of  more  aliveness  than  the  sombre  yards  of  the 
town  could  afford. 

Tommy  had  taken  the  baby  from  me,  for,  though 
I  could  somehow  never  get  enough  of  the  feel  of  him, 
his  head  in  the  hollow  of  my  shoulder,  his  weight 
against  my  arm,  I  was  so  little  strong  myself  that  I 


136  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

was  glad  to  pretend  that  it  was  because  he  was 
really  getting  heavy.  Just  then  we  passed  a  little 
mound,  so  low,  where  a  new  headboard  had  been  set 

up  with  the  superscription,  "Only  son  of and 

aged  eight  months,"  and  it  was  the  age,  and 

the  little  mound  was  just  the  length  of  my  boy.  I 
think  there  was  a  rush  of  tears  to  cover  the  real 
ization,  by  a  kind  of  prevision,  that  it  was  just  to 
this  he  was  to  come,  —  tears  checked  in  mid-course 
by  the  swift  up-rush  of  the  certainty,  of  the  reality, 
of  the  absoluteness  of  human  experience.  For  by 
whatever  mystery  or  magic  he  had  come  to  identity 
through  me,  he  was  my  son  as  I  knew,  and  not  even 
death  could  so  unmake  him. 

I  dwell  upon  this  and  one  other  incident  which  I 
shall  relate  in  its  proper  place,  as  all  that  was  of 
fered  to  me  of  the  traditional  compensation  for 
what  women  are  supposed  to  be.  If  a  sedulous 
social  ideal  has  kept  them  from  the  world  touch 
through  knowledge  and  achievement,  it  has  been 
because,  sincerely  enough,  they  have  not  been  sup 
posed  to  be  prevented  from  world  processes  so 
much  as  directed  to  find  them  in  a  happier  way. 
This  would  be  reasonable  if  they  found  them.  What 
society  fails  to  understand,  or  dishonestly  fails  to 
admit,  is  that  marriage  as  an  act  is  not  invariably 
the  stroke  that  ushers  in  the  experience  of  being 
married. 

Whatever  proportions  the  change  in  my  life  had 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  137 

assumed  to  the  outward  eye,  it  was  only  by  the 
imagined  pain  of  loss  that  I  began  to  perceive  that 
I  could  never  be  quite  in  the  same  relation  to  things 
again,  and  to  identify  my  experience  with  the  world 
adventure.  I  had  become,  by  the  way  of  giving 
life  and  losing  it,  a  link  in  the  chain  that  leads 
from  dark  to  dark;  I  had  touched  for  the  moment 
a  reality  from  which  the  process  of  self-realization 
could  be  measured.  It  was  the  most  and  the  best 
I  was  to  know  of  the  incident  called  maternity, 
that  whether  it  were  most  bitter  or  most  sweet 
it  was  irrevocable. 

I  suppose,  though  he  was  always  so  inarticulate, 
that  Tommy  must  have  caught  something  of  my 
mood  from  me.  He  didn't  seem  to  see  anything 
ridiculous  in  my  holding  on  to  a  fold  of  the  baby's 
skirt  all  the  way  home;  and  when  we  had  come 
into  the  house  and  the  boy  was  laid  in  his  crib 
again,  so  wan  and  so  little,  I  sat  on  my  young 
husband's  knee  and  cried  with  my  face  against  his, 
and  he  did  not  ask  me  what  it  was  about. 

I  think,  though,  that  we  had  not  yet  appreciated 
how  near  we  were  to  losing  him  until  my  mother 
came  to  visit  us  along  in  the  middle  of  the  summer. 
She  was  quite  excited,  as  she  walked  up  from  the 
station  with  Tommy,  and  for  her,  almost  gay  with  the 
novelty  of  spending  a  month  with  a  married  daugh 
ter,  and  then  as  soon  as  she  had  sight  of  the  child, 
I  saw  her  checked  and  startled  inquiry  travel  from 


138  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

me  to  Tommy  and  back  to  the  child's  meagre  little 
features,  and  a  new  and  amazing  tenderness  in  all 
her  manner  to  me.  That  night  after  I  was  in  bed  she 
came  in  her  night-dress  and  kissed  me  without  saying 
anything,  and  I  was  too  surprised  to  make  any  mo 
tion  of  response.  That  was  the  first  time  I  remember 
my  mother  having  kissed  me  on  anything  less  than  an 
official  occasion  .  t.  ,  .  ~  but  she  had  buried  five 
herself.  :  >., 

Notwithstanding  the  care  she  took  of  the  baby, 
my  mother's  coming  seemed  to  make  me,  if  any 
thing,  less  prepared  for  the  end.  There  were  new 
remedies  of  my  mother's  to  be  tried  which  ap 
peared  hopeful.  I  recovered  composure,  thought 
of  him  as  improving,  when  in  fact  it  was  only  I  who* 
was  stronger  for  a  few  nights'  uninterrupted  sleep. 
Then  there  was  a  day  on  which  he  was  very  quiet 
and  she  scarcely  put  him  down  from  her  lap  at  all. 
I  do  not  know  what  I  thought  of  that,  nor  of  the 
doctor  coming  twice  that  day,  unsummoned.  I  sup 
pose  my  sensibilities  must  have  been  blunted  by  the 
strain,  for  I  recall  thinking  when  Tommy  came  home 
in  the  middle  of  the  afternoon,  how  good  it  was  we 
could  all  have  this  quiet  time  together.  It  was  the 
end  of  June.  I  remember  the  blinds  half  drawn 
against  the  sun  and  the  smell  of  lawns  newly  cut 
and  the  damask  rose  by  the  window;  I  was  going 
about  putting  fresh  flowers  in  the  vases,  a  thing  I 
had  of  late  little  time  to  do  ...  suddenly  I  noticed 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  139 

Tommy  crying.  He  sat  close  to  my  mother  trying 
to  make  the  boy's  poor  little  claws  curl  round  his 
finger,  and  at  the  failure  tears  ran  down  un wiped. 
I  had  never  seen  Tommy  cry.  I  put  down  my  roses 
uncertain  if  I  ought  to  go  to  him  ....  and  all  at 
once  my  mother  called  me. 


CHAPTER  HI 

VERY  closely  on  the  loss  of  my  baby,  of  which  I  have 
spared  you  as  much  as  possible,  came  crowding  the 
opening  movement  of  my  artistic  career.  Within 
a  month  I  was  in  a  hospital  in  Chicago,  recovering 
from  the  disastrous  termination  of  another  expect 
ancy  that  had  come,  scarcely  regarded  in  the  ob 
session  of  anxiety  and  overwork  during  the  last  weeks 
of  my  boy's  life,  and  had  failed  to  sustain  itself  under 
the  shock  of  his  death.  And  after  the  hospital 
there  was  a  month  of  convalescence  at  Pauline's. 
It  was  the  first  time  I  had  seen  her  since  her  mar 
riage. 

I  found  'her  living  in  one  of  those  curious,  com 
pressed  city  houses,  one  room  wide  and  three  deep, 
which,  after  the  rambling,  scattered  homes  of 
Higgleston,  induced  a  feeling  of  cramp,  until  I  dis 
covered  a  kind  of  spaciousness  in  the  life  within.  It 
was  really  very  little  else  than  relief  from  the  accus 
tomed  inharmonies  of  rurality,  a  sort  of  scenic  air 
and  light  that  answered  perfectly  so  long  as  you  be 
lieved  it  real.  Pauline's  wall  papers  were  soft, 
unpatterned,  with  wide  borders;  her  windows  were 
hung  with  plain  scrim  and  the  furniture  coverings 
were  in  tone  with  the  carpets.  When  ladies  called  in 

140 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  141 

the  afternoon,  Pauline  gave  them  tea  which  she 
made  in  a  brass  kettle  over  a  spirit  lamp.  You  can 
scarcely  understand  what  that  kettle  stood  for  in  my 
new  estimate  of  the  graciousness  of  living:  a  kind  of 
sacred  flamen,  round  which  gathered  unimagined 
possibilities  for  the  dramatization  of  that  eager  in 
ward  life  which,  now  that  the  strictures  of  bodily 
pain  were  loosed,  began  to  press  toward  expression. 
It  rose  insistently  against  the  depressing  figure  my 
draggled  and  defeated  condition  must  have  cut  in 
the  face  of  Pauline's  bright  competency  and  the 
quality  of  assurance  in  her  choice  of  the  things  among 
which  she  moved.  Whatever  her  standards  of  be 
haviour  or  furniture,  they  were  always  present  to  the 
eye,  not  sunk  below  the  plane  of  consciousness  like 
mine,  and  she  could  always  name  you  the  people  who 
practised  them  or  the  places  where  they  could  be 
bought,  and  at  what  price.  My  expressed  interest 
in  the  teakettle,  led  at  once  to  the  particular  depart 
ment  store  where  I  saw  rows  of  them  shining  in  the 
ticketed  inaccessibility  of  seven  dollars  and  ninety- 
eight  cents.  From  point  to  point  of  such  eminent 
practicability  I  was  pricked  to  think  of  preempt 
ing  some  of  these  new  phases  of  suitability  for  myself, 
finding  myself  debarred  by  the  flatness  of  my  purse. 
The  effect  of  it  was  to  throw  me  back  into  the  be 
numbing  sense  of  personal  neglect  with  which  the 
city  had  burst  upon  me.  From  the  first,  as  I  began 
to  go  about  still  in  my  half -invalided  condition,  I  had 


142  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

been  tremendously  struck  with  the  plentitude  of 
beauty.  Here  was  every  article  of  human  use  made 
fair  and  fit  so  that  nobody  need  have  lacked  a  por 
tion  of  it,  save  for  an  inexplicable  error  in  the  means 
of  distribution.  I,  for  instance,  who  had  within  me 
the  witness  of  heirship,  had  none  of  it. 

That  I  should  have  felt  it  so,  was  no  doubt  a  part 
of  that  Taylorvillian  fallacy  in  which  I  had  been 
reared,  that  all  that  was  precious  and  desirable  was 
shed  as  the  natural  flower  and  fruit  of  goodness. 
Here  confronted  with  the  concrete  preciousness  of 
the  shop  windows,  I  realized  that  if  there  had  been 
anything  originally  sound  in  that  proposition,  I  had 
at  least  missed  the  particular  kind  of  goodness  to 
which  it  was  chargeable.  I  wanted,  I  absurdly 
wanted  just  then  to  collect  my  arrears  of  privilege 
and  consideration  in  terms  of  hardwood  furniture 
and  afternoon  teakettles,  in  graceful,  feminine  leisure, 
all  the  traditional  sanctity  and  enthronement  of 
women,  for  which  I  had  paid  with  my  body,  with 
maternal  anxieties  and  wifely  submission.  What 
glimmered  on  my  horizon  was  the  realization  that 
it  was  not  in  such  appreciable  coin  the  debt  was  paid, 
the  beginning  of  knowledge  that  seldom,  except  by 
accident,  is  it  paid  at  all.  What  I  learned  from 
Pauline  was  that  most  of  it  came  by  way  of  the  bar 
gain  counter.  Not  even  the  Shining  Destiny  was 
due  to  arrive  merely  by  reason  of  your  own  private 
conviction  of  being  fit,  but  demanded  something  to 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  143 

be  laid  down  for  it;  though  if  you  had  named  the 
whole  price  to  me  at  that  juncture,  I  should  have 
refused  to  pay. 

Besides  all  this,  the  most  memorable  thing  that 
came  of  my  visit  to  Pauline  was  that  I  went  to  the 
theatre.  It  was  Henry's  suggestion;  he  thought  I 
wanted  cheering.  Pauline  was  not  going  out  much 
that  season  and  her  reluctance  to  claim  my  attention, 
in  the  face  of  my  bereavement,  to  her  own  approach 
ing  Event,  threw  at  times  a  shadow  of  constraint  on 
our  quiet  evenings.  Henry  had  fallen  into  a  way  of 
taking  me  out  for  timid  and  Higglestonian  glimpses 
of  the  night  sights  of  the  city,  but  I  am  not  sure 
it  was  the  obligation  of  hospitality  which  led  him  to 
propose  the  theatre.  I  recall  that  he  displayed  a 
particular  knowingness  about  what  he  styled  "the 
attractions."  What  surprised  me  most  was  that  I 
discovered  no  qualms  in  myself  over  a  proceeding 
so  at  variance  with  my  bringing  up;  and  the  piece,  a 
broad  comedy  of  Henry's  selection,  made  no  partic 
ular  impression  on  me  other  than  the  singular  one 
of  having  known  a  great  deal  about  it  before.  My 
criticism  of  the  acting  brought  Pauline  around  with 
a  swing  from  the  City  Cousin  attitude  in  which  she 
had  initiated  the  experience  for  me,  to  one  aesthet 
ically  sympathetic. 

"The  things  men  choose,  my  dear — and  to  any 
body  who  has  been  saturated  in  Shakespeare  as  you 
have!  You  really  must  see  Modjeska;  it  will  be  an 


144  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

inspiration  to  you.     Henry,  you  must  take  her  to 
see  Modjeska." 

I  had  not  yet  made  up  my  mind  as  to  whether  I 
liked  Henry  Mills,  but  I  was  willing  to  go  and  see 
Modjeska  with  him;  we  had  orchestra  seats  and 
Pauline  insisted  on  my  wearing  her  black  silk  wrap. 
On  the  way,  Henry  told  me  a  great  deal  about 
Madam  Modjeska  with  that  same  air  of  knowing- 
ness  which  fitted  so  oddly  with  his  assumption  of 
the  model  husband.  I  had  accustomed  myself  to 
think  of  Henry  as  an  attorney,  which  in  Taylorville 
meant  a  man  who  could  be  trusted  with  the  ad 
ministration  of  widows'  property  and  Fourth  of 
July  orations.  Henry,  it  transpired,  was  a  sort  of 
junior  partner  in  one  of  those  city  firms  whose  con 
cern  is  not  with  people  who  have  broken  the  law, 
but  with  those  who  are  desirous  to  sail  as  close  to 
the  wind  as  possible  without  breaking  it.  They  had 
a  great  deal  to  do  with  stock  companies,  in  connec 
tion  with  which  Henry  had  found  some  personal 
advantage.  He  always  referred  to  it  as  "our  office" 
so  that  I  am  in  doubt  still  as  to  the  exact  nature  of 
his  connection  with  it;  its  only  relation  to  his  pri 
vate  life  was  to  lead  to  his  habitually  appearing  in 
what  is  known  as  a  business  suit,  and  an  air  of 
shrewd  reliability.  If  in  the  beginning  he  had  any 
notions  of  his  own  as  to  what  a  husband  ought  to 
be,  he  had  discarded  them  in  favour  of  Pauline's, 
and  if  as  early  as  that  he  had  devised  any  system 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  145 

of  paying  himself  off  for  his  complicity  in  her  ideals, 
I  didn't  discover  it. 

I  saw  Modjeska  with  Henry,  in  "Romeo  and 
Juliet,"  and  afterward  stole  away  to  a  matinee  by 
myself  and  saw  her  as  Rosalind.  I  do  not  know  now 
if  she  was  the  great  artist  she  seemed,  it  is  so  long 
since  I  have  seen  her,  but  she  sufficed.  I  had  no 
words  in  which  to  express  my  extraordinary  sense 
of  possession  in  her,  the  profound,  excluding  inti 
macy  of  her  art.  Long  after  Henry  Mills  had  gone 
to  his  connubial  pillow  I  remained  walking  up  and 
down  in  my  room  in  a  state  of  intense,  inarticulate 
excitement.  I  did  not  think  concretely  of  the  stage 
nor  of  acting;  what  I  had  news  of,  was  a  country 
of  large  impulses  and  satisfying  movement.  I  felt 
myself  strong,  had  I  but  known  the  way,  to  set 
out  for  it.  When  I  found  sleep  at  last,  it  was  to 
dream,  not  of  the  theatre,  but  of  Helmeth  Garrett. 
I  was  made  aware  of  him  first  by  a  sense  of  fulness 
about  my  heart,  and  then  I  came  upon  him  looking 
as  he  had  looked  last  in  the  Willesden  woods,  writing 
at  a  table,  a  pale  blur  about  him  of  the  causeless  light 
of  dreams.  I  recognized  the  carpet  underfoot  as  a 
favourite  Taylorvillian  selection,  but  overhead,  red 
boughs  of  sycamore  and  oak  depended  through  the 
dream-fogged  atmosphere.  I  stood  and  read  over 
his  shoulder  what  he  wrote,  and  though  the  words 
escaped  me,  the  meaning  of  them  put  all  straight  be 
tween  us.  He  turned  as  he  wrote  and  looked  at  me 


146  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

with  a  look  that  set  us  back  in  the  wrapt  intimacy  of 
the  flaming  forest  ....  presently  we  reached  there 
and  found  it  softly  dark!  In  the  interval  between  my 
dream  and  morning  that  kiss  which  had  been  the 
source  of  so  much  secret  blame  and  secret  exulta 
tion  was  somehow  accounted  for:  it  was  a  waif  out 
of  the  country  of  Rosalind  and  Juliet.  The  sense  of 
a  vital  readjustment  remained  with  me  all  that  day; 
there  had  been  after  all,  hi  the  common  phrase, 
"something  between  us."  But  I  explained  the  re 
crudescence  of  memory  on  the  basis  that  it  was  from 
Helmeth  Garrett  that  I  had  first  heard  of  Chicago 
and  Modjeska. 

I  came  back  to  Higgleston  reasonably  well,  with 
some  fine  points  of  achievement  twinkling  ahead  of 
me,  to  have  my  new-found  sense  of  direction  put  all 
at  fault  by  the  trivial  circumstance  of  Tommy's 
having  papered  the  living  room.  The  walls  when 
we  took  the  house,  had  been  finished  hard  and  white, 
much  in  need  of  renewing,  from  the  expense  of  which 
our  immediate  plunge  into  the  cares  of  a  family  had 
prevented  us.  Casting  about  for  any  way  of  ridding 
it  against  my  return,  of  the  sadness  of  association, 
Tommy  had  hit  upon  the  idea  of  papering  the  room 
himself  in  the  evenings  after  closing  hours,  and  by 
way  of  keeping  it  a  pleasant  surprise,  had  chosen  the 
paper  to  his  own  taste.  Any  one  who  kept  house  in 
the  early  80's  will  recall  a  type  of  paper  then  in 
vogue,  of  large  unintelligent  arabesques  of  a  liverish 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  147 

bronzy  hue,  parting  at  regular  intervals  upon  Nea 
politan  landscapes  of  pronounced  pinks  and  blues. 
Tommy's  landscapes  achieved  the  added  atrocity  of 
having  Japanese  ladies  walking  about  in  them,  and 
though  the  room  wanted  lighting,  the  paper  was 
very  dark.  It  must  have  cost  him  something  too ! 
From  the  amount  of  his  salary  which  he  had  remit 
ted  for  my  hospital  expenses  he  could  hardly  have 
left  himself  money  to  pay  for  his  meals  at  Higgle- 
ston's  one  doubtful  restaurant.  The  appearance  of 
the  kitchen,  indeed,  suggested  that  he  had  made  most 
of  them  on  crackers  and  tinned  ham. 

I  was  glad  to  have  discovered  this  before  I  said  to 
him  how  much  better  it  would  have  been  for  him  to 
send  me  the  money  and  let  me  select  the  paper  in 
Chicago.  What  leaped  upon  me  as  he  waved  the 
lamp  about  to  show  me  how  cleverly  he  had  matched 
the  borders,  was  the  surprising,  the  confounding  cer 
tainty  that  after  all  our  shared  sorrow  and  anxiety 
we  hadn't  in  the  least  come  together.  I  had  lived 
in  the  house  with  him  for  two  years,  had  borne  him 
a  child  and  lost  it,  and  he  had  chosen  this  moment  of 
heartrending  return,  to  give  me  to  understand  that 
he  couldn't  even  know  what  I  might  like  in  the  way 
of  wall  papers. 

I  suppose  all  this  time  when  the  surface  of  my 
attention  was  taken  up  with  the  baby,  I  had  been 
making  unconscious  estimates  of  my  husband,  but 
that  night  just  as  we  had  come  from  the  station,  the 


148'  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

moment  of  calculating  that  on  a  basis  of  necessary 
economy,  I  should  have  to  live  at  least  three  years 
with  the  evidence  of  his  ineptitude,  was  the  first  of 
my  regarding  him  critically  as  the  instrument  of  my 
destiny.  And  I  hadn't  primarily  selected  him  for 
that  purpose.  I  do  not  know  now  exactly  why  I 
married  Tommy,  except  that  marriage  seemed  a 
natural  sort  of  experience  and  I  had  taken  to  it  as 
readily  as  though  it  had  been  something  to  eat, 
something  to  nourish  and  sustain.  I  hadn't  at  any 
rate  thought  of  it  as  entangling.  I  did  not  then;  but 
certainly  it  occurred  to  me  that  for  the  enlarged 
standard  of  living  I  had  brought  home  with  me,  a 
man  of  Tommy's  taste  was  likely  to  prove  an  un 
suitable  tool. 

Slight  as  the  incident  of  the  wall  paper  was,  it 
served  to  check  my  dawning  interest  in  domesticity, 
and  set  my  hungering  mind  looking  elsewhere  for 
sustenance.  We  were  still  a  little  in  arrears  on  ac 
count  of  the  funeral  expenses  and  my  illness,  and  no 
more  improvements  were  to  be  thought  of;  Tommy 
and  I  were  of  one  mind  in  that  we  had  the  common 
Taylorvillian  horror  of  debt.  There  were  other 
things  which  seemed  to  put  off  my  conquest  of  the 
harmonious  environment,  things  every  woman  who 
has  lost  a  child  will  understand ....  starting  awake 
at  night  to  the  remembered  cry  .  .  .  the  blessed 
weight  upon  the  arm  that  failed  and  receded  before 
returning  consciousness.  I  recall  going  into  the  bed- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  149 

room  once  where  a  shawl  had  been  dropped  on  the 
pillow,  like  ...  so  like  .  .  .  and  the  memories  of 
infinitesimal  neglects  that  began  to  show  now  pre 
posterously  blamable. 

In  my  first  year  at  Higgleston  I  had  been  rather 
driven  apart  from  the  community  by  the  absorption 
of  my  condition  and  the  intimation  that  instead  of 
being  the  crown  of  life  it  merely  saved  itself  by  not 
being  mentioned.  Now,  in  my  desperate  need  of 
the  social  function,  I  began,  to  imagine,  for  want  of 
any  other  likeness  between  us,  a  community  of  lack. 
I  thought  of  Higgleston  as  aching  for  life  as  I  ached, 
and  began  to  wonder  if  we  mightn't  help  one  another.; 

As  the  colder  weather  shut  me  more  into  the1 
haunted  rooms,  Tommy  thought  it  might  be  a 
good  thing  if  I  took  an  interest  in  the  entertain 
ment  which  the  I.  O.  O.  F.,  of  which  he  was  a 
Fellow,  was  undertaking  for  the  benefit  of  their  new 
hall.  As  the  sort  of  service  counted  on  from  the 
wives  of  prominent  members,  it  might  also  be  bene 
ficial  to  trade.  On  this  understanding  I  did  take 
an  interest,  with  the  result  that  the  entertainment 
was  an  immese  success.  It  led  naturally  to  my 
being  put  in  charge  of  the  annual  Public  School 
Library  theatricals  and  a  little  later  to  my  being 
connected  with  what  was  the  acute  dramatic  crisis 
of  the  Middle  West. 

There  should  be  a  great  many  people  still  who  re 
member  a  large,  loose  melodrama  called  "  The  Union 


150  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

Spy,"  or  "  The  Confederate  Spy,"  accordingly  as  it 
was  performed  north  or  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's 
line,  participated  in  by  the  country  at  large;  a  sort  of 
localized  Passion  play  lifted  by  its  tremendous  per 
sonal  interest  free  of  all  theatrical  taint.  There  was 
a  Captain  McWhirter  who  went  about  with  the 
scenery  and  accessories,  casting  the  parts  and  con 
ducting  rehearsals,  sharing  the  profits  with  the  local 
G.  A.  R.  The  battle  scenes  were  invariably  exe 
cuted  by  the  veterans  of  the  order,  with  horrid 
realism.  Effie  wrote  me  that  there  had  been  three 
performances  in  Taylorville  and  Cousin  Judd  had 
been  to  every  one  of  them. 

With  the  reputation  I  had  acquired  in  Higgleston, 
it  came  naturally  when  the  town,  by  its  slighter  hold 
on  the  event,  achieved  a  single  performance,  for  me 
to  be  cast  for  the  principal  part,  unhindered  by 
any  convention  on  behalf  of  my  recent  mourning. 
Rather,  so  close  did  the  subject  lie  to  the  community 
feeling,  there  was  an  instinctive  sense  of  dramatic 
propriety  in  my  sorrow  in  connection  with  the  an 
guish  of  war-bereaved  women.  One  can  imagine  such 
a  sentiment  operating  in  the  choice  of  players  at 
Oberammergau.  In  addition  to  my  acting,  I  began 
very  soon  to  take  a  large  share  of  the  responsibility 
of  rehearsals. 

I  do  not  know  where  I  got  the  things  I  put  into 
that  business.  Where,  in  fact,  does  Gift  come  from, 
and  what  is  the  nature  of  it?  I  found  myself  falling 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  151 

back  on  my  studies  with  Professor  Winter,  on  slight 
amateurish  incidents  of  Taylorville,  on  my  brief 
Chicago  contact  even,  to  account  to  Higgleston  for 
insights,  certainties,  that  they  would  not  have  ac 
cepted  without  some  such  obvious  backing.  Never 
theless  the  thing  was  there,  the  aptitude  to  seize 
and  carry  to  its  touching,  its  fruitful  expression,  the 
awkward  eagerness  of  the  community  to  relive  its 
most  moving  actualities.  Never  in  America  have 
we  been  so  near  the  democratic  drama. 

In  the  final  performance  I  surprised  Tommy  and 
myself  with  my  success,  most  of  all  I  surprised  Cap 
tain  McWhirter.  He  was  arranging  a  production 
of  "The  Spy"  at  the  twin  towns  of  Newton  and  Can- 
field,  about  two  hours  south  of  us,  and  asked  me  to 
go  down  there  for  him  and  attend  to  alternate  re 
hearsals.  Tommy  was  immensely  flattered,  pleased  to 
have  me  forget  my  melancholy,  and  the  money  was  a 
consideration.  I  saw  the  captain  through  with  two 
performances  in  each  town,  and  three  at  Water- 
bury.  All  this  time  I  had  not  thought  of  the  stage 
professionally.  I  returned  to  Tommy  and  the  wall 
paper  after  the  final  performance  with  a  vague  sense 
of  flatness,  to  try  to  pull  together  out  of  Higgleston's 
unwilling  materials  the  stuff  of  a  satisfying  exist 
ence. 

Suddenly  in  April  came  a  telegram  and  a  letter 
from  Captain  McWhirter  at  Kincade,  to  say  that 
on  the  eve  of  production,  his  leading  lady  had  run 


152  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

away  to  be  married,  and  could  I,  would  I,  come  down 
and  see  him  through.  The  letter  contained  an  en 
closure  for  travelling  expenses,  and  a  substantial 
offer  for  my  time.  No  reasonable  objection  pre 
senting  itself,  I  went  down  to  him  by  Monday's 
train. 


CHAPTER  IV 

ON  THE  morning  between  the  second  and  third  per 
formance  of  "The  Spy,"  for  McWhirter  never  let  the 
people  off  with  less  than  three  if  he  could  help  it,  as 
I  was  sitting  in  the  dining  room  of  the  Hotel  Met- 
ropole  at  Kincade,  enjoying  the  sense  of  leisure  a 
late  breakfast  afforded,  I  saw  the  captain  making 
his  way  toward  me  through  an  archipelago  of  whitish 
island  upon  which  the  remains  of  innumerable  break 
fasts  appeared  to  be  cast  awayt without  hope  of  rescue 
from  the  languid  waiters,  steering  as  straight  a  course 
as  was  compatible  with  a  conversation  kept  up  over 
his  shoulder  with  a  man,  who  for  a  certain  close- 
cropped,  clean-shaven,  ever-ready  look,  might  have 
been  bred  for  the  priesthood  and  given  it  up  for  the 
newspaper  business.  It  was  a  type  and  manner  I 
was  to  know  very  well  as  the  actor-manager,  but  as 
the  first  I  had  seen  of  that  species,  I  failed  to  identify 
it.  What  I  did  remark  was  the  odd  mixture  of  con 
descension  and  importance  which  the  captain  man 
aged  to  put  into  the  fact  of  being  caught  in  his  com 
pany.  He  introduced  him  to  me  as  Mr.  O'Farrell, 
Mr.  Shamus  O'Farrell,  as  though  there  could  be  but 
one  of  him  and  that  one  fully  accredited  and  ex 
plained.  He  defined  him  further — after  some  remarks 

153 


154  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

on  the  performance  of  the  evening  before  in  a  key 
which  seemed  to  sustain  the  evidence  of  Mr.  O'Far- 
rell's  name  in  favour  of  his  nationality  —  as  manager 
of  the  Shamrock  Players  Company,  billed  for  the 
first  of  the  week  in  Kincade. 

It  turned  out  in  the  course  of  these  remarks, 
which  the  captain  delivered  with  a  kind  of  proprie 
tary  air  in  us,  that  Mr.  O'Farrell  —  he  called  himself 
The  O'Farrell  in  his  posters  —  had  a  proposition  to 
make  to  me.  He  put  it  with  an  admirable  mixture 
of  compliment  and  depreciation,  as  though  either  was 
a  sort  of  stopcock  to  meet  a  too  reluctant  modesty 
on  my  part  or  a  too  exorbitant  demand  for  payment. 
I  was  afterward  to  know  many  variations  of  this 
singular  blend,  and  to  acquaint  myself  definitely  how 
far  it  was  safe  to  trust  it  in  either  direction  before  the 
stop  was  turned,  but  for  the  moment  I  was  under 
the  impression,  as  no  doubt  O'Farrell  meant  I 
should  be,  that  a  thing  so  perfectly  asked  for  should 
not  be  refused. 

What  he  asked  was  that  I  should  come  over  to  the 
opera  house  where  the  rest  of  the  company  awaited 
us,  to  assist  at  a  rehearsal  in  the  part  left  open  by  the 
illness  of  the  star.  I  do  not  now  recall  if  the  man 
ager  actually  made  me  an  offer  in  this  first  encounter, 
but  it  was  in  the  air  that  if  I  suited  the  part  and  the 
part  suited  me,  I  was  to  regard  myself  as  temporarily 
engaged  in  Miss  Dean's  place. 

So  naturally  had  the  occasion  come  about,  that  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  155 

cannot  remember  that  I  found  any  particular  dif 
ficulty  in  reconciling  myself  to  a  possible  connection 
with  the  professional  stage.  There  had  been  no 
church  of  my  denomination  at  Higgleston,  and  I  had 
affiliated  with  one  made  up  of  the  remnants  of  two 
or  three  other  houseless  sects,  under  the  caption  of 
the  United  Congregations,  and  there  was  nothing 
in  its  somewhat  loosened  discipline  that  positively 
forbade  the  theatre.  In  my  work  with  McWhirter, 
the  play  had  come  to  mean  so  much  the  intimate  ex 
pression  of  life,  so  wove  itself  with  all  that  had  been 
profound  and  heroic  in  the  experience  of  the  people, 
that  it  seemed  to  come  quite  as  a  matter  of  course  for 
me  to  be  walking  out  between  the  captain  and  the 
manager  toward  the  opera  house.  O'Farrell,  too,  must 
have  beguiled  me  with  that  extraordinary  Celtic 
faculty  for  the  sympathetic  note,  for  I  am  sure  I 
received  the  impression  as  we  went,  that  his  play, 
"The  Shamrock,"  meant  quite  as  much  to  the 
Irish  temperament,  as  "The  Spy"  could  mean 
to  Ohianna.  The  manager  and  McWhirter  had 
crossed  one  another's  trails  on  more  than  one  occa 
sion,  which  seemed  to  give  the  whole  affair  the  colour 
of  neighbourliness. 

It  transpired  in  the  course  of  our  walk  that  Laurine 
Dean,  America's  greatest  emotional  actress  —  it  was 
O'Farrell  called  her  that  —  had  been  taken  down 
at  Waterbury  with  bronchitis,  and  the  cast  having 
been  already  disarranged  by  an  earlier  defection,  he 


156  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

had  been  obliged  to  cancel  several  one-night  stands 
and  put  in  at  Kincade  to  wait  until  a  substitute  could 
be  procured  from  St.  Louis  or  Chicago,  which 
difficulty  was  happily  obviated  by  the  discovery  of 
Mrs.  Olivia  Betters  worth. 

All  this,  as  I  was  to  learn  later,  was  not  so  near  the 
truth  as  it  might  be,  but  it  served.  I  could  never 
make  out,  so  insistent  was  each  to  claim  the  credit 
of  it,  whether  it  was  OTarrell  or  McWhirter  first 
thought  of  offering  the  part  to  me,  but  there  it  was 
for  me  to  take  it  or  leave  it  as  I  was  so  inclined.  Our 
own  performance  was  in  Armory  Hall  and  this  was 
my  first  entrance  of  the  back  premises  of  a  proper 
stage.  I  recall  as  we  came  in  through  the  stage 
door  having  no  feeling  about  it  all  but  an  odd  one 
of  being  entirely  habituated  to  such  entrances. 

They  were  all  there  waiting  for  us,  the  Shamrocks, 
grouped  around  the  prompter's  table  in  a  dimly  lit, 
dusty  space,  with  a  half  conscious  staginess  even  in 
their  informal  groupings,  men  and  women  regarding 
me  with  a  queer  mixture  of  coldness  and  ingratia- 
tion.  I  had  time  to  take  that  in,  and  an  impres 
sion  of  shoppy  smartness,  before  Manager  OTarrell 
with  a  movement  like  the  shuffling  of  cards  drew  us 
all  together  in  a  kind  of  general  introduction  and 
commanded  the  rehearsal  to  begin.  Well,  I  went 
on  with  it  as  I  suppose  it  was  foregone  I  should  as 
soon  as  I  had  smelled  the  dust  of  action,  which  was 
the  stale  and  musty  cloud  that  rolled  up  on  our  skirts 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  157 

from  the  floor  and  shook  down  upon  our  shoulders 
from  the  wings,  too  unsophisticated  even  to  guess  at 
the  situation  which  the  manager's  air  of  genial  hurry 
was  so  admirably  planned  to  cover.  I  read  from 
the  prompter's  book  —  O'Farrell  had  sketched  the 
plot  to  me  on  the  way  over  —  and  did  my  utmost  to 
keep  up  with  his  hasty  interpolations  of  the  business. 
I  was  feeling  horribly  amateurish  and  awkward  in 
the  presence  of  these  second-rate  folk,  whom  I  took 
always  far  too  seriously,  and  suddenly  swamped  in 
confusion  at  hearing  the  manager  call  out  to  me  from 
the  orchestra  what  was  meant  for  instruction,  in  an 
utterly  unintelligible  professional  jargon.  McWhir- 
ter  through  some  notion,  I  suppose,  of  keeping  his 
work  innocuously  amateurish,  had  used  no  sort  of 
staginess,  and  the  phrase  froze  me  into  mortification. 
With  the  strain  of  attention  I  was  already  under  I 
could  not  even  make  an  intelligent  guess  at  his  mean 
ing,  as  O'Farrell,  mistaking  my  hesitation,  repeated  it 
with  growing  peremptoriness.  I  could  see  the  rest 
of  the  cast  who  were  on  the  stage  with  me,  aware 
of  my  embarrassment,  and  letting  the  situation  fall 
with  a  kind  of  sulky  detachment,  which  struck 
me  then,  and  still,  as  vulgar  rather  than  cruel. 
Suddenly  from  behind  me  a  voice  smooth  and  full, 
translated  the  clipped  jargon  into  ordinary  speech. 
I  had  not  time,  as  I  moved  to  obey  it,  for  so  much 
as  a  grateful  glance  over  my  shoulder,  but  I  knew 
very  well  that  the  voice  had  come  from  a  young 


158  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

woman  of  about  my  own  age,  who,  as  I  entered 
at  the  beginning  of  the  rehearsal,  had  been  sitting  in 
the  wings,  taking  in  my  introduction  with  the  gaze  of 
a  tethered  cow,  quiet,  incurious,  oblivious  of  the 
tether.  As  soon  as  I  was  free  from  the  first  act,  I  got 
around  to  her. 

"Thank  you  so  much,"  I  began.  "You  see  I  am 
not  used " 

"Why  do  you  care?"  she  wondered.  "It  is  only 
a  kind  of  slang.  They  all  had  to  learn  it  once." 

I  could  see  that  she  sprang  from  my  own  class. 
Taylorville,  the  high  school,  the  village  dressmaker, 
might  have  turned  her  out  that  moment;  and  by 
degrees  I  was  aware  that  she  was  beautiful:  pale, 
tanned  complexion,  thick  untaught  masses  of  brown 
hair,  and  pale  brown  eyes  of  a  profound  and  unfath- 
omed  rurality.  As  she  moved  across  the  stage  at  the 
prompter's  call,  with  her  skirts  bunched  up  on  her 
hip  with  a  safety  pin,  out  of  the  dust,  as  if  she  had 
just  come  from  scrubbing  the  dairy,  I  fairly  started 
with  the  shock  of  her  bodily  perfection  and  her 
extraordinary  manner  of  going  about  with  it  as 
though  it  were  something  picked  up  in  passing  for  the 
convenience  of  covering.  It  provoked  me  to  the 
same  sort  of  involuntary  exclamation  as  though  one 
should  see  a  child  playing  with  a  rare  porcelain.  By 
contrast  she  seemed  to  bring  out  in  the  others,  streaks 
and  flashes  of  cheapness,  of  the  stain  and  wear  of 
unprofitable  use. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  159 

She  came  to  me  again  at  the  end  of  her  scene. 
"Where  do  you  live?"  she  wished  to  know.  "I  can 
come  around  with  you  and  coach  you  with  your 
part." 

"I'm  not  sure,"  I  hesitated:  "I  don't  know  if  I 
shall  go  on  with  it."  She  took  me  again  with  her 
slow,  incurious  gaze. 

"Why,  what  else  are  you  here  for?" 

That  in  fact  appeared  to  be  Mr.  OTarrell's  view  of 
it,  and  though  I  went  through  the  form  of  taking  the 
day  to  think  it  over  and  telegraph  to  Tommy,  I  did 
finally  engage  myself  to  the  Shamrock  Company  for 
the  term  of  Miss  Dean's  illness.  My  husband  made 
no  objection  except  that  he  preferred  I  should  not 
use  my  own  name,  as  indeed,  O'Farrell  had  no  notion 
of  my  doing,  as  the  posters  and  programmes  stood 
in  Miss  Dean's  name  already. 

We  had  from  Thursday  to  Monday  to  get  up  my 
part.  With  all  my  quickness  I  could  not  have 
managed  it,  except  for  the  alacrity  with  which,"after 
the  first  day,  all  the  company  played  up  to  my  busi 
ness,  prompted  me  in  my  lines,  and  assisted  in  my 
make-up.  There  was,  if  I  had  but  known  it,  a  rea 
son  for  this  extra  helpfulness,  which,  remembering 
the  way  the  ladies  of  the  United  Congregations  had 
pulled  and  hauled  about  the  Easter  entertainment, 
went  far  with  me  toward  raising  the  estimate  of 
professional  acting  among  the  blessed  privileges. 
Several  members  of  the  cast  had  felt  themselves 


160  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

entitled  to  Miss  Dean's  place,  for  the  manager  had 
refused  to  pay  an  understudy,  and  found  it  easier  to 
concede  it  to  me,  a  brilliant  society  woman  as  I 
had  been  figured  to  them  —  I  suspected  McWhirter 
there  —  a  talented  amateur  who  would  return  to 
privacy  and  trouble  the  profession  no  more,  rather 
than  to  one  who  might  be  expected  to  develop 
tendencies  to  keep  what  she  had  got.  Moreover, 
they  had  played  to  small  houses  of  late,  most  of  the 
salaries  were  in  arrears,  and  from  the  first  of  my  tak 
ing  hold  of  it,  it  began  to  be  certain  that  the  piece 
would  go.  For  I  not  only  played  the  part  of  the 
gay,  melodramatic  Irish  Eileen,  but  I  played  with 
it.  There  was  all  my  youth  in  it,  the  youth  I  hadn't 
had,  there  was  wild  Ellen  McGee  and  the  wet  pas 
tures  and  the  woods  aflame.  With  Tommy  and  a 
home  to  fall  back  upon,  with  no  professional  stand 
ing  to  keep,  with  no  bitterness  and  rancours,  I  adven 
tured  with  the  part,  tossed  it  up  and  made  sport  of 
it,  played  it  as  a  stupendous  lark.  The  rest  of  the 
company  took  it  from  me  that  it  was  a  lark,  and 
were  as  solicitous  to  see  it  through  for  me  as  though  I 
had  been  an  only  child  among  a  lot  of  maiden  aunts. 
And  I  did  not  know  of  course  that  this  charm  of  good 
fellowship  was  based  more  directly  on  the  box-office 
returns  than  on  the  community  of  art. 

Incidentally  a  great  deal  that  went  on  in  my  behalf 
threw  light  on  the  character  and  disposition  of  the 
star. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  161 

"I  'most  wore  my  fingers  off,  hookin'  'er  up,"  con 
fided  the  dresser  who  took  in  her  gowns  for  me,  "but 
she  won't  let  out  an  inch,  not  she.  Well,  this  spell  '11 
pull  'er  down  a  bit,  that's  one  comfort." 

Cecelia  Brune  made  me  up.  She  was  the  youngest 
member  of  the  company  and  that  she  was  dis- 
tractingly  and  unnecessarily  pretty  didn't  obviate 
the  certainty  that  in  Milwaukee  where  she  was  born 
she  had  been  known  as  Cissy  Brown. 

"You  don't  really  need  anything  but  a  little  colour 
and  black  around  the  eyes,"  she  insisted.  "Dean 
is  a  sight  when  she's  made  up;  got  so  much  to  cover. 
I'll  bet  she  is  no  sicker  than  me,  she's  just  taken  the 
slack  time  to  get  her  wrinkles  massaged.  Gee,  if  I 
had  a  face  like  hers  I'd  take  it  off  and  have  it  ironed !" 

Cecelia,  I  may  remark,  lived  for  her  prettiness;  she 
lived  by  it.  She  had  a  speaking  part  of  half  a  dozen 
lines  and  a  dance  in  the  Village  Green  act,  and  her 
mere  appearance  on  the  street  of  any  town  where  we 
were  billed,  was  good  for  two  solid  rows  clear  across 
the  house.  In  Cecelia's  opinion  this  was  the  quin 
tessence  of  art,  to  attract  males  and  keep  them  dan 
gling,  and  to  eke  out  her  personal  adornment  by  gifts 
which  she  managed  to  extract  from  her  admirers 
without  having  yet  paid  the  inestimable  price  for 
them.  Married  woman  as  I  was,  I  was  too  coun 
trified  to  understand  that  inevitably  she  must  finally 
pay  it.  She  had  all  the  dewy,  large-eyed  soft 
ness  of  look  that  one  reluctantly  disassociates  from 


162  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

innocence,  and  a  degree  of  cold,  grubby  calculation 
which  she  mistook,  flaunted  about  in  fact,  for  chas 
tity.  It  was  she  who  told  me  as  much  as  I  got  to 
know  for  a  great  many  years  of  Sarah  Croyden, 
who  had  already  taken  me  with  the  fascination  of 
her  Gift,  the  inordinate  curiosity  to  know,  to  touch 
and  to  prove,  which  makes  me  still  the  victim  of  its 
least  elusive  promise  and  the  dupe  of  any  poor  pre 
tender  to  it.  I  wanted  something  to  account  for, 
except  when  she  was  under  the  obsession  of  a  part, 
her  marked  inadequacy  to  her  perfect  exterior,  for 
the  rich  full  voice  that,  caught  in  the  wind  of  her 
genius,  gripped  and  threatened,  but  ran  through  her 
ordinary  conversation  as  flaccid  as  a  velvet  ribbon. 

She  was,  by  Cecelia's  account,  the  daughter  of  a 
Baptist  elder  in  a  small  New  York  town,  strictly 
brought  up  —  I  could  measure  the  weals  of  the 
strictness  upon  my  own  heart  —  and  had  run  away 
with  an  actor  named  Lawrence,  after  one  wild,  brief 
encounter  when  O'Farrell  had  been  playing  in  the 
town.  That  was  before  Cecelia's  time  and  she  had 
no  report  of  the  said  Lawrence  except  that  he  was 
-as  handsome  as  they  make  them  and  a  regular  rotter. 

"She'd  ought  to  have  known,"  opined  Cecelia  — 
though  where  in  her  nineteen  years  she  could  have 
acquired  the  groundwork  of  such  knowledge  was 
more  than  I  could  guess  —  "She'd  ought  to  have 
known  what  she  was  up  against  by  his  bein'  so  will 
ing  to  marry  her.  He  wouldn't  have  put  his  head 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  163 

in  a  noose  like  that  without  he  had  hold  of  the  loose 
end  of  it  himself." 

That  he  had  so  held  it,  transpired  in  less  than  a 
year,  in  the  reappearance  of  a  former  wife  who  turned 
up  at  his  lodging  one  night  to  wait  his  return  from 
the  theatre,  where,  no  one  knew  by  what  diabolical 
agency,  Lawrence  had  word  of  her,  and  made  what 
Cecelia  called  a  "get  away."  What  passed  between 
the  two  women  on  that  occasion  must  have  been  note 
worthy,  but  it  was  sunk  forever  under  Sarah's 
unfathomable  rurality.  OTarrell,  who  of  his  class 
was  a  very  decent  sort,  had  been  so  little  able  to  bear 
the  sight  of  beauty  in  distress  that  he  offered  the 
poor  girl  an  unimportant  part  as  an  alternative  to 
starvation,  and  Sarah  had  very  quickly  settled  what 
was  to  become  of  her  by  developing  extraordinary 
talent. 

I  think  no  one  of  us  at  that  time  quite  realized 
how  good  she  was;  Cecelia  Brune,  I  know,  did  not 
even  think  her  beautiful. 

"No  style,"  she  said,  settling  her  corset  at  the 
hips  and  fluffing  up  her  pompadour  with  my  comb, 
"  and  no  figgur."  But  myself,  I  seemed  to  see  her 
the  mere  embodiment  of  a  gift  which  had  snatched 
at  this  chance  encounter  with  an  actor,  to  swing  into 
opportunity,  regardless  of  its  host.  Whenever  I 
watched  her  acting,  some  living  impulse  deep  within 
me  reared  its  head. 

I  have  set  all  this  down  here  because  with  the  ex- 


164  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

ception  of  Manager  O'Farrell  and  Jimmy  Vantine, 
the  comedian,  who  was  thirty-five,  objectionable, 
and  in  love  with  Cecelia,  these  two  women  were  all 
I  ever  saw  again  of  the  Shamrock  players.  Miss 
Dean  I  did  not  meet  on  this  occasion,  for  though  at 
the  end  of  three  weeks,  before  I  had  time  to  tire  of 
travel  and  new  towns  and  nightly  triumphs,  she 
wrote  she  would  return  to  her  work,  it  fell  out  that 
she  did  not  actually  return  until  I  was  well  on  my 
way  home. 

"I  thought  she  would  have  a  quick  recovery  when 
she  found  out  what  a  sweep  you'd  been  makin',"  re 
marked  Cecelia.  That  was  all  the  comment  that 
passed  on  the  occasion.  If  Mr.  O'Farrell  made  no 
motion  toward  making  me  a  permanent  member  of 
his  company,  there  were  reasons  for  it  that  I  under 
stood  better  later.  I  had  to  own  to  a  little  disappoint 
ment  that  nobody  came  to  the  station  to  see  me  off 
except  Cecelia  and  Sarah  Croyden.  It  is  true  Jimmy 
Vantine  was  there,  but  he  left  us  in  no  doubt  that  he 
only  came  because  Cecelia  had  promised  to  spend 
the  interval  between  their  train  and  my  own  in  his 
company.  He  fussed  about  with  my  luggage  in 
order  to  get  me  off  as  quickly  as  possible. 

The  very  bread-and-buttery  relation  of  the  Sham 
rocks  to  what  was  for  me  the  community  of  Art,  had 
never  struck  so  sourly  upon  me  as  at  the  casual 
quality  of  their  good-byes.  I  remembered  noticing 
that  morning  how  very  little  hair  there  was  on  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  165 

top  of  Jimmy  Vantine's  head,  and  that  he  did  not 
seem  to  me  quite  clean.  I  found  myself  so  let  down 
after  the  three  weeks'  excitement  that  I  thought  it 
necessary  at  Springfield,  where  I  changed,  to  inter 
pose  two  days'  shopping  between  me  and  Higgleston. 
Among  other  things  I  bought  there,  were  a  spirit 
lamp  and  a  brass  teakettle. 


CHAPTER  V 

UNDERSTAND  that  up  to  this  time  I  had  not  yet 
thought  of  the  stage  as  a  career  for  myself.  I  hadn't 
yet  needed  it.  I  had  not  then  realized  that  the 
insight  and  passion  which  have  singled  me  out 
among  women  of  my  profession  couldn't  be  turned 
to  render  the  mere  business  of  living. beautiful  and 
fit.  I  hardly  understand  it  now.  Why  should 
people  pay  night  after  night  to  see  me  loving, 
achieving,  suffering,  in  a  way  they  wouldn't  think 
of  undertaking  for  themselves?  Life  as  I  saw  it 
was  sufficiently  dramatic:  charged,  wonderful.  I  at 
least  felt  at  home  in  the  great  moments  of  kings, 
the  tender  hours  of  poets,  and  I  hadn't  thought  of 
my  participation  in  these  things  rendering  me  in 
any  way  superior  to  Higgleston  or  even  different. 
If  I  had,  I  shouldn't  have  settled  there  in  the  first 
place.  If  I  had  glimpsed  even  at  Tommy's  exclu 
sion  from  all  that  mattered  passionately  to  me,  I 
shouldn't  have  married  him.  It  was  because  I  had 
not  yet  begun  to  be  markedly  dissatisfied  with 
either  of  them  that  I  presently  got  myself  the  repu 
tation  of  having  trampled  both  Tommy  and  Higgle 
ston  underfoot.  I  must  ask  your  patience  for  a 
little  until  I  show  you  how  wholly  I  offered  myself 

166 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  167 

to  them  both  and  how  completely  they  wouldn't 
have  me. 

The  point  of  departure  was  of  course  that  I  didn't 
accept  the  Higglestonian  reading  of  married  obliga 
tions  to  mean  that  my  whole  time  was  to  be  taken' 
up  with  just  living  with  Tommy.  It  was  as  natural, 
and  in  view  of  the  scope  it  afforded  for  individual 
development,  a  more  convenient  arrangement  than 
living  with  my  mother,  but  not  a  whit  more  absorb 
ing.  I  couldn't,  anyway,  think  of  just  living  as  an 
end,  and  accordingly  I  looked  about  for  a  more 
spacious  occupation;  I  thought  I  had  found  it  in  the 
directing  of  that  submerged  spiritual  passion  which 
I  had  felt  in  the  sustaining  drama  of  the  war.  I  had 
a  notion  there  might  be  a  vent  for  it  in  the  shape  of  a 
permanent  dramatic  society  by  means  of  which  all 
Higgleston,  and  I  with  them,  could  escape  tempo 
rarily  from  its  commonness  into  the  heroic  move 
ment.  It  was  all  very  clear  in  my  own  mind  but  it 
failed  utterly  in  communication. 

I  began  wrongly  in  the  first  place  by  asking  the 
Higgleston  ladies  to  tea.  Afternoon  tea  was  un 
heard  of  in  Higgleston,  and  I  had  forgotten,  or  per 
haps  I  had  never  learned,  that  in  Higgleston  you 
couldn't  do  anything  different  without  implying 
dissatisfaction  with  things  as  they  were.  You  were 
likely  on  such  occasions  to  be  visited  by  the  inquiry 
as  to  whether  the  place  wasn't  good  enough  for  you. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  afternoon  tea  was  almost  as 


168  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

unfamiliar  to  me  as  to  the  rest  of  them,  but  I  had 
read  English  novels  and  I  knew  how  it  ought  to  be 
done.  I  knew  for  instance,  that  people  came  and 
went  with  a  delightful  informality  and  had  tea  made 
fresh  for  them,  and  were  witty  or  portentous  as  the 
occasion  demanded.  My  invitations  read  from  four 
to  five,  and  the  Higgleston  ladies  came  solidly  within 
the  minute  and  departed  in  phalanxes  upon  the 
stroke  of  five.  They  all  wore  their  best  things, 
which,  from  the  number  of  black  silks  included,  and 
black  kid  gloves  not  quite  pulled  on  at  the  finger  tips, 
gave  the  affair  almost  a  funereal  atmosphere.  They 
had  most  of  them  had  their  tea  with  their  midday 
meal,  and  Mrs.  Dinkelspiel  said  openly  that  she 
didn't  approve  of  eating  between  meals.  They  sat 
about  the  room  against  the  wall  and  fairly  hypno 
tized  me  into  getting  up  and  passing  things,  which  I 
knew  was  not  the  way  tea  should  be  served.  In 
Higgleston,  the  only  occasion  when  things  were 
handed  about,  were  Church  sociables  and  the  like, 
when  the  number  of  guests  precluded  the  possibility 
of  having  them  all  at  your  table;  and  by  the  time  I 
got  once  around,  the  tea  was  cold  and  I  realized  how 
thin  my  thin  bread  and  butter  and  chocolate  wafers 
looked  in  respect  to  the  huge,  soft  slabs  of  layer  cake, 
stiffened  by  frosting  and  filling,  which,  in  Higgleston 
went  by  the  name  of  light  refreshments.  The  only 
saving  incident  was  the  natural  way  in  which  Mrs. 
Ross,  our  attorney's  wife  who  visited  East  every 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  169 

summer  and  knew  how  things  were  done,  asked  for 
"two  lumps,  please,"  and  came  back  a  second  time 
for  bread  and  butter.  I  think  they  were  all  tre 
mendously  pleased  to  be  asked,  though  they  didn't 
intend  to  commit  themselves  to  the  innovation  by 
appearing  to  have  a  good  time.  And  that  was  the 
occasion  I  chose  for  broaching  my  great  subject, 
without,  I  am  afraid,  in  the  least  grasping  their  inca 
pacity  to  share  in  my  joyous  discovery  of  the  world 
of  Art  which  I  so  generously  held  out  to  them. 

It  hadn't  been  possible  to  keep  my  professional 
adventure  from  the  townspeople,  nor  had  I  at 
tempted  it.  What  I  really  felt  was  that  we  were 
to  be  congratulated  as  a  community  in  having  one 
among  us  privileged  to  experience  it,  and  I  honestly 
think  I  should  have  felt  so  of  any  one  to  whom  the 
adventure  had  befallen.  But  I  suspect  I  must  have 
given  the  impression  of  rather  flaunting  it  in  their 
faces. 

I  put  my  new  project  on  the  ground  that  though 
we  were  dissevered  by  our  situation,  there  was  no 
occasion  for  our  being  out  of  touch  with  the  world  of 
emotion,  not,  at  least,  so  long  as  we  had  admission  to 
it  through  the  drama;  and  it  wasn't  in  me  to  imagine 
that  the  world  I  prefigured  to  them  under  those 
terms  was  one  by  their  standards  never  to  be  kept 
sufficiently  at  a  distance. 

Mrs.  Miller  put  the  case  for  most  of  them  with  the 
suggestion  thrown  out  guardedly  that  she  didn't 


170  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"know  as  she  held  with  plays  for  church  members"; 
she  was  a  large,  tasteless  woman,  whose  husband  kept 
the  lumber  yard  and  derived  from  it  an  extensive 
air  of  being  in  touch  with  the  world's  occupations. 
"And  I  don't  know, "  she  went  on  relentlessly,  "that 
I  ever  see  any  good  come  of  play  acting  to  them 
that  practise  it." 

Mrs.  Ross,  determined  to  live  up  to  her  two  lumps, 
came  forward  gallantly  with: 

"Oh,  but,  Mrs.  Miller,  when  our  dear  Mrs. 
Bettersworth " 

"That's  what  I  was  thinking  of,"  Mrs.  Miller  put 
it  over  her. 

"Well  for  my  part,"  declared  Mrs.  Dinkelspiel, 
with  the  air  of  not  caring  who  knew  it,  "I  don't  want 
my  girls  to  sell  tickets  or  anything;  it  makes  'em  too 
forward."  Mrs.  Harvey,  whose  husband  was  in 
hardware,  began  to  tell  discursively  about  a  per 
fectly  lovely  entertainment  they  had  had  in  Newton 
Centre  for  the  missionary  society,  which  Mrs.  Miller 
took  exception  to  on  the  ground  of  its  frivolity. 

"I  don't  know,"  she  maintained,  "if  the  Lord's 
work  ain't  hindered  by  them  sort  of  comicalities  as 
much  as  it's  helped." 

I  am  not  sure  where  this  discussion  mightn't  have 
landed  us  if  the  general  attention  had  not  been  dis 
tracted  just  then  by  my  husband,  an  hour  be 
fore  his  time,  coming  through  the  front  gate  and  up 
the  walk.  He  had  evidently  forgotten  my  tea  party, 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  171 

for  he  came  straight  to  me,  and  backed  away  pre 
cipitately  through  the  portieres  as  soon  as  he  saw 
the  assembled  ladies  sitting  about  the  wall.  It  was 
not  that  which  disturbed  us;  any  Higgleston  male 
would  have  done  the  same,  but  it  was  plain  in  the 
brief  glimpse  we  had  of  him  that  he  looked  white  and 
stricken.  A  little  later  we  heard  him  in  the  back  of 
the  house  making  ambiguous  noises  such  as  not  one 
of  my  guests  could  fail  to  understand  as  the  precursor 
of  a  domestic  crisis.  I  could  see  the  little  flutter  of 
uneasiness  which  passed  over  them,  between  their 
sense  of  its  demanding  my  immediate  attention  and 
the  fear  of  leaving  before  the  expressed  time.  For 
tunately  the  stroke  of  five  released  them.  The  door 
was  hardly  shut  on  the  last  silk  skirt  when  I  ran  out 
and  found  him  staring  out  of  the  kitchen  window. 

"Well?  "I  questioned. 

"I  thought  they  would  never  go,"  he  protested. 
"Come  in  here."  He  led  the  way  to  the  living  room 
as  if  somehow  he  found  it  more  appropriate  to  the 
gravity  of  what  he  had  to  impart,  and  yet  failed  to 
make  a  beginning  with  his  news.  He  shut  the  door 
and  leaned  against  it  with  his  hands  behind  him  for 
support. 

"Has  anything  happened?" 

"Happened?  Oh,  I  don't  know.  I've  lost  my 
job." 

"Lost?     Burton  Brothers?"     I  was  all  at  sea. 

He  nodded.     "They're  closing  out;  the  manager's 


172  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

in  town  to-day.  He  told  us".  .  .  .  By  degrees  I  got 
it  out  of  him.  Burton  Brothers  thought  they  saw 
hard  times  ahead,  they  were  closing  out  a  number  of 
their  smaller  establishments,  centring  everything 
on  their  Chicago  house.  Suddenly  my  thought 
leaped  up. 

"But  couldn't  they  give  you  something  there  .  .  . 
in  Chicago?"  I  was  dizzy  for  a  moment  with  the 
wild  hope  of  it.  Never  to  live  in  Higgleston  any 
more  —  but  Tommy  cut  me  short. 

"They've  men  who  have  been  with  them  longer 
than  I  have  to  provide  for  ....  I  asked. " 

"Oh,  well,  no  matter.  The  world  is  full  of  jobs." 
Looking  for  one  appealed  to  me  in  the  light  of  an 
adventure,  but  because  I  saw  how  pale  he  was  I 
went  to  him  and  began  to  kiss  him  softly.  By  the 
way  he  yielded  himself  to  me  I  grasped  a  little  of  his 
lost  and  rudderless  condition,  once  he  found  himself 
outside  the  limits  of  a  salaried  employment.  I  be 
gan  to  question  him  again  as  the  best  way  of  getting 
the  extent  of  our  disaster  before  us. 

"What  does  Mr.  Rathbone  say?"  Rathbone  was 
our  working  tailor,  a  thin,  elderly,  peering  man  of  a 
sort  you  could  scarcely  think  of  as  having  any 
existence  apart  from  his  shop.  He  used  to  come 
sidling  down  the  street  to  it  and  settle  himself  among 
his  implements  with  the  air  of  a  brooding  hen  taking 
to  her  nest;  the  sound  of  his  machine  was  a  con 
tented  clucking. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  173 

"He  was  struck  all  of  a  heap.  They're  better  fixed 
than  we  are."  Tommy  added  this  as  an  after 
thought  as  likely  to  affect  the  tailor's  attitude  when 
he  came  to  himself.  "They"  were  old  Rathbone 
and  his  daughter,  one  of  those  conspicuously  blond 
and  full-breasted  women  who  seem  to  take  to  the 
dressmaking  and  millinery  trades  by  instinct.  As 
she  got  herself  up  on  Sunday  in  her  smart  tailoring, 
with  a  hat  "from  the  city,"  and  her  hair  amazingly 
pompadoured,  she  was  to  some  of  the  men  who  came 
to  our  church,  very  much  what  the  brass  teakettle  was 
to  me,  a  touch  of  the  unattainable  but  not  unap 
preciated  elegancies  of  life.  Tommy  admired  her 
immensely  and  was  disappointed  that  I  did  not 
have  her  at  the  house  oftener. 

"They've  got  her  business  to  fall  back  on," 
Tommy  suggested  now  with  an  approach  to  envy. 
He  had  never  seen  Miss  Rathbone  as  I  had,  pro 
fessionally,  going  about  with  her  protuberant  bosom 
stuck  full  of  pins,  a  tape  line  draped  about  her 
collarless  neck,  and  her  skirt  and  belt  never  quite  to 
gether  in  the  back,  so  he  thought  of  her  establishment 
as  a  kind  of  stay  in  affliction. 

"And  I  have  the  stage,"  I  flourished.  It  was 
the  first  time  I  had  thought  of  it  as  an  expedient, 
but  I  glanced  away  from  the  thought  in  passing,  for 
to  say  the  truth  I  didn't  in  the  least  know  how  to  go 
about  getting  a  living  by  it.  I  creamed  some  chipped 
beef  for  Tommy's  supper,  a  dish  he  was  particularly 


174  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

fond  of,  and  opened  a  jar  of  quince  marmalade,  and 
all  the  time  I  wasn't  stirring  something  or  setting  the 
table,  I  had  my  arms  around  him,  trying  to  prop  him 
against  what  I  did  not  feel  so  much  terrifying  as 
exciting.  We  talked  a  little  about  his  getting  his  old 
place  back  in  Taylorville,  and  just  as  we  were 
clearing  away  the  supper  things  we  saw  Miss  Rath- 
bone,  with  her  father  tucked  under  her  arm,  pass  the 
square  of  light  raying  out  into  the  spring  dusk  from 
our  window,  and  a  moment  later  they  knocked  at  our 
door.  It  was  one  of  the  things  that  I  felt  bound  to 
like  Miss  Rathbone  for,  that  she  took  such  care  of 
her  father;  she  did  everything  for  him,  it  was  said, 
even  to  making  up  his  mind  for  him,  and  this  evening 
by  the  flare  of  the  lamp  Tommy  held  up  to  welcome 
them,  it  was  clear  she  had  made  it  up  to  some  pur 
pose.  It  must  have  been  what  he  saw  in  her  face 
that  made  my  husband  put  the  lamp  back  on  the 
table  from  which  the  white  cloth  had  not  yet  been 
removed,  as  if  the  clearing  up  was  too  small  a  matter 
to  consort  with  the  occasion. 

I  was  relieved  to  have  my  husband  take  charge 
of  the  visit,  especially  as  he  made  no  motion  to 
invite  them  into  the  front  room  where  the  remains 
of  the  bread  and  butter  and  the  chairs  against  the 
wall  would  have  apprised  Miss  Rathbone  of  my 
having  entertained  company  on  an  occasion  to  which 
she  had  not  been  invited.  It  was  part  of  Tommy's 
sense  of  social  obligation  that  we  ought  never  to 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  175 

neglect  Mr.  Rathbone,  whom,  though  his  connection 
with  the  business  was  as  slight  as  my  husband's,  he 
insisted  on  regarding  as  in  some  sort  a  partner.  So 
we  sat  down  rather  stiffly  about  the  table  still 
shrouded  in  its  white  cloth,  as  though  upon  it  were 
about  to  be  laid  out  the  dead  enterprise  of  Burton 
Brothers,  and  looked,  all  of  us,  I  think,  a  little 
pleased  to  find  ourselves  in  so  grave  a  situation. 

Miss  Rathbone,  who  had  always  a  great  many 
accessories  to  her  toilet,  bags  and  handkerchiefs 
and  scarves  and  things,  laid  them  on  the  table  as 
though  they  were  a  kind  of  insignia  of  office,  and 
made  a  poor  pretence  to  keep  up  with  me  the  proper 
feminine  detachment  from  the  business  which  had 
brought  them  there.  We  neither  of  us,  Miss 
Rathbone  and  I,  had  the  least  idea  what  the  other 
might  be  thinking  about  or  presumably  interested  in, 
though  I  think  she  made  the  more  gallant  effort  to 
pretend  that  she  did.  On  this  evening  I  could  see 
that  she  was  full  of  the  project  for  which  she  had 
primed  her  father,  and  was  nervously  anxious  lest 
he  shouldn't  go  off  at  the  right  moment  or  with  the 
proper  pyrotechnic. 

I  remember  the  talk  that  went  on  at  first,  because 
it  was  so  much  in  the  way  of  doing  business  in 
Higgleston,  and  impressed  me  even  then  with  its 
factitious  shrewdness,  based  very  simply  on  the 
supposition  that  Capitalists  —  it  was  under  that 
caption  that  Burton  Brothers  figured  —  never  meant 


176  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

what  they  said.  Capitalists  were  always  talking  of 
hard  times;  it  was  part  of  their  deep  laid  perspicacity. 
Burton  Brothers  wished  to  sell  out  the  business;  was 
it  reasonable  to  suppose  they  would  think  it  good 
enough  to  sell  and  not  good  enough  to  go  on  with? 

"Father  thinks,"  said  Miss  Rathbone,  and  I  am 
sure  he  had  done  so  dutifully  at  her  instigation, 
"that  they  couldn't  ask  no  great  price  after  talking 
about  hard  times  the  way  they  have." 

It  was  not  in  keeping  with  what  was  thought  to 
be  woman's  place,  that  she  should  go  on  to  the  com 
pleted  suggestion.  In  fact,  so  far  as  I  remember  it 
never  was  completed,  but  was  talked  around  and 
about,  as  if  by  indirection  we  could  lessen  the 
temerity  of  the  proposal  that  old  Rathbone  and 
Tommy  should  buy  out  the  shop  on  such  favor 
able  terms  as  Burton  Brothers,  in  view  of  their 
own  statement  of  its  depreciation,  couldn't  fail  to 
make. 

"You  could  live  over  the  store,"  Miss  Rathbone 
let  fall  into  the  widening  rings  of  silence  that  fol 
lowed  her  first  suggestion;  "your  rent  would  be 
cheaper,  and  it  would  come  into  the  business. " 

I  felt  that  she  made  it  too  plain  that  the  chief 
objection  that  my  husband  could  have  was  the  lack 
of  money  for  the  initial  adventure;  but  because  I 
realized  that  much  of  my  instinctive  resistance  to  a 
plan  that  tied  him  to  Higgleston  as  to  a  stake,  was  due 
to  her  having  originated  it,  I  kept  it  to  myself.  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  177 

had  a  hundred  inarticulate  objections,  chief  of  which 
was  that  I  couldn't  see  how  any  plan  that  was 
acceptable  to  the  Rathbones  could  get  me  on  toward 
the  Shining  Destiny;  but  when  you  remember  that 
i  I  hadn't  yet  been  able  to  put  that  concretely  to  my 
self,  you  will  see  how  impossible  it  was  that  I  should 
have  put  it  to  my  husband.  In  the  end  Tommy 
was  talked  over.  I  believe  the  consideration  of 
going  on  in  the  same  place  and  under  the  same 
circumstances  without  the  terrifying  dislocation 
of  looking  for  a  job,  had  more  to  do  with  it 
than  Miss  Rathbone's  calculation  of  the  profits. 
We  wrote  home  for  the  money;  Effie  wrote  back  that 
everything  of  mother's  was  involved  in  the  station 
ery  business,  which  was  still  on  the  doubtful  side  of 
prosperity,  but  Tommy's  father  let  us  have  three 
hundred  dollars. 

The  necessity  of  readjusting  our  way  of  life  to' 
Tommy's  new  status  of  proprietor,  and  moving  in 
over  the  store,  kept  my  plans  for  the  dramatic 
exploitation  of  Higgleston  in  abeyance.  It  seemed 
however  by  as  much  as  I  was  now  bound  up  with 
the  interest  of  the  community,  to  put  me  on  a  better 
footing  for  beginning  it,  and  on  Decoration  Day, 
walking  in  the  cemetery  under  the  bright  boughs, 
between  the  flowery  mounds,  the  Gift  stirred  in 
me,  played  upon  by  this  touching  dramatization 
of  common  human  pain  and  loss.  I  recalled  that 
it  was  just  such  solemn  festivals  of  the  people  that 


178  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

I  had  had  in  mind  to  lay  hold  on  and  make  the 
medium  of  a  profounder  appreciation.  And  the 
next  one  about  to  present  itself  as  an  occasion  was 
the  Fourth  of  July. 

I  detached  myself  from  Tommy  long  enough  to 
make  my  way  around  to  two  or  three  of  the  ladies 
who  usually  served  on  the  committee. 

"We  ought  to  have  a  meeting  soon  now,"  I  sug 
gested;  "it  will  take  all  of  a  month  to  get  the  chil 
dren  ready." 

"That's  what  we  thought,"  agreed  Mrs.  Miller 

heavily.  "They  was  to  our  house  Thursday " 

She  went  on  to  tell  me  who  was  to  read  the  Declara 
tion  and  who  deliver  the  oration.' 

"But,"  I  protested,  "that's  exactly  what  they've 
had  every  Fourth  these  twenty  years!" 

"Well,  I  guess,"  said  Mrs.  Harvey,  "if  Higgleston 
people  want  that  kind  of  a  celebration,  they've  a 
right  to  have  it. " 

"I  guess  they  have,"  Mrs.  Miller  agreed  with 
her. 

They  had  always  rather  held  it  out  against  me  at 
Higgleston  that  I  had  never  taken  the  village  squab 
bles  seriously,  that  I  was  reconciled  too  quickly  for  a 
proper  sense  of  their  proportions,  and  they  must  have 
reckoned  without  this  quality  in  me  now,  for  I  was  so 
far  from  realizing  the  deliberateness  of  the  slight,  that 
I  thought  I  would  go  around  on  the  way  home  and 
see  our  minister;  perhaps  he  could  do  something.  It 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  179 

appeared  simply  ridiculous  that  Higgleston  shouldn't 
have  the  newest  of  this  sort  of  thing  when  it  was 
there  for  the  asking. 

I  found  him  raking  the  garden  in  his  third  best 
suit  and  the  impossible  sort  of  hat  affected  by  pro 
fessional  men  in  their  more  human  occasions.  The 
moment  I  flashed  out  at  him  with  my  question  about 
the  committee,  he  fell  at  once  into  a  manner  of 
ministerial  equivocation  —  the  air  of  being  man 
enough  to  know  he  was  doing  a  mean  thing  with 
out  being  man  enough  to  avoid  doing  it.  Er  .  .  . 
yes,  he  believed  there  had  been  a  meeting  ...  he 
hadn't  realized  that  I  was  expecting  to  be  notified. 
I  wasn't  a  regular  member,  was  I? 

"No,"  I  admitted,  "but  last  year "    The 

intention  of  the  slight  began  to  dawn  on  me. 

"You  see,  the  programme  is  usually  made  up  from 
the  children  of  the  united  Sunday  schools.  .  ." 

"I  know,  of  course,  but  what  has  that  .  .  ?"  He 
did  know  how  mean  it  was;  I  could  see  by  the  dex 
terity  with  which  he  delivered  the  blow. 

"A  good  many  of  the  mothers  thought  they'd 
rather  not  have  them  exposed  to  ...  er  ...  pro 
fessional  methods."  As  an  afterthought  he  tried  to 
give  it  the  cast  of  a  priestly  remonstrance  which  he 
must  have  seen  didn't  in  the  least  impose  on  me. 

I  suppose  it  was  the  fear  of  how  I  might  put  it  to 
one  of  his  best  paying  parishioners  that  led  him  to  go 
around  to  the  store  the  next  morning  and  make  mat- 


180  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

ters  worse  by  explaining  to  Tommy  that  though  the 
children  weren't  to  be  contaminated  by  my  pro 
fessionalism,  it  could  probably  be  arranged  for  me 
to  "recite  something."  To  do  Tommy  justice,  he 
was  as  mad  as  a  hatter.  Being  so  much  nearer  to 
village-mindedness  himself,  I  suppose  my  husband 
could  better  understand  the  mean  envy  of  my 
larger  opportunity,  but  his  obduracy  in  maintain 
ing  that  I  had  been  offended  led  to  the  only  real 
initiative  he  ever  showed  in  all  the  time  I  was  mar 
ried  to  him. 

"I'd  just  like  to  show  them!"  he  kept  sputtering. 
All  at  once  he  cheered  up  with  a  snort.  "/'/Z  show 
them!"  He  was  very  busy  all  the  evening  with 
letters  which  he  went  out  on  purpose  to  post,  with 
the  result  that  when  a  few  days  later  he  made  his 
contribution  to  the  fireworks  fund,  he  made  it  a  little 
larger,  as  became  a  live  business  man,  on  the  ground 
that  he  wouldn't  be  able  to  participate,  since  his 
wife  had  "accepted  an  invitation  to  take  charge  of 
the  programme  at  Newton  Centre."  Newton  Centre 
was  ten  miles  away,  and  though  I  couldn't  do  much 
on  account  of  the  difficulty  of  rehearsals,  I  managed 
to  make  the  announcement  of  it  in  the  county  paper 
convey  to  them  that  what  they  had  missed  wasn't 
quite  to  be  sicklied  over  by  Mrs.  Miller's  assever 
ation  of  a  notable  want  of  moral  particularity  at 
Newton  Centre.  The  very  first  time  I  went  out  to  a 
Sunday-school  social  thereafter,  it  was  made  plain  to 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  181 

I 
me  that  if  I  wanted  to  take  up  the  annual  Library 

entertainment,  it  was  open  to  me. 

"And  I  always  will  say,"  Mrs.  Miller  conceded, 
"that  there's  nobody  can  make  your  children  seem 
such  a  credit  to  you  as  Mrs.  Bettersworth. " 

"It's  a  regular  talent  you  have,"  Mrs.  Harvey 
backed  her  up,  "like  a  person  in  the  Bible."  This 
scriptural  reference  came  in  so  aptly  that  I  could  see 
several  ladies  nodding  complacently.  Mrs.  Ross 
sailed  quite  over  them  and  landed  on  the  topmost 
peak  of  approbation. 

"I've  always  believed,"  she  asserted,  "that  a 
Christian  woman  on  the  stage  would  have  an  up 
lifting  influence." 

But  by  this  time  my  ambition  had  slacked  under 
the  summer  heat  and  the  steady  cluck  of  old  Rath- 
bone's  machine  and  the  mixed  smell  of  damp  woollen 
under  the  iron,  and  creosote  shingle  stains.  There 
had  been  no  loss  of  social  standing  in  our  living  over 
the  store;  such  readjustments  in  Higgleston  went 
by  the  name  of  bettering  yourself,  and  were  com 
mendable.  But  somehow  I  could  never  ask  ladies  to 
tea  when  the  only  entrance  was  by  way  of  a  men's 
furnishing  store.  The  four  rooms,  opening  into  one 
another  so  that  there  was  no  way  of  getting  from  the 
kitchen  to  the  parlour  except  through  the  bedroom, 
I  found  quite  hopeless  as  a  means  of  expressing  my 
relation  to  all  that  appealed  to  me  as  inspiring, 
dazzling.  Because  I  could  not  go  out  without  mak- 


182  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

ing  a  street  toilet,  I  went  out  too  little,  and  suffered 
from  want  of  tone.  And  suddenly  along  in  Septem 
ber  came  a  letter  from  O'Farrell  offering  me  a  place 
in  his  company,  and  a  note  from  Sarah  begging  me  to 
accept  it.  If  up  to  that  time  I  had  not  thought  of 
the  stage  as  a  career,  now  at  the  suggestion  the 
desire  of  it  ravened  in  me  like  a  flame. 


CHAPTER  VI 

"AND  you  never  seem  to  think  I  might  not  want  my 
wife  to  go  on  the  stage?" 

I  do  not  know  what  unhappy  imp  prompted 
Tommy  to  take  that  tone  with  me;  but  whenever 
I  try  to  fix  upon  the  point  of  reprehensibleness 
which  led  on  from  my  writing  to  O'Farrell  that  I 
would  join  him  in  ten  days  in  Chicago,  to  the  tragic 
termination  of  my  marriage,  I  found  myself  whirled 
about  this  attitude  of  his  in  the  deep-seated  pas 
sionate  Why  of  my  life.  Why  should  love  be  tied 
to  particular  ways  of  doing  things?  What  was  this 
horror  of  human  obligation  that  made  it  necessary, 
since  Tommy  and  I  were  so  innocently  fond  of  one 
another,  that  one  of  us  should  be  made  unhappy 
by  it?  Why  should  it  be  so  accepted  on  all  sides 
that  it  should  be  I?  For  my  husband's  feeling 
was  but  a  single  item  in  the  total  of  social  preju 
dice  by  which,  once  my  purpose  had  gone  abroad 
by  way  of  the  Rathbones,  I  found  myself  driven 
apart  from  the  community  interest  as  by  a  hostile 
tide,  across  which  Higgleston  gazed  at  me  with 
strange,  begrudging  eyes.  I  recall  how  the  men 
looked  at  me  the  first  time  I  went  out  afterward, 
a  little  aslant,  as  though  some  ineradicable  taint  of 

183 


184  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

impropriety  attached  in  their  minds  to  any  associa 
tion  with  the  stage. 

Whatever  attitude  Tommy  finally  achieved  in  the 
necessity  of  sustaining  the  situation  he  had  created 
for  himself  by  his  backing  of  my  first  professional 
venture,  was  no  doubt  influenced  by  the  need  of  cov 
ering  his  hurt  at  realizing,  through  my  own  wild  rush 
to  embrace  the  present  opportunity,  how  far  I  was 
from  accepting  life  gracefully  at  his  hands,  the  docile 
creature  of  his  dreams.  Little  things  come  back  to 
me  .  .  .  words,  looks  .  .  .  sticks  and  straws  of  his 
traditions  made  wreckage  by  the  wind  of  my  desire, 
which  my  resentment  at  his  sympathy  with  ,the  gen 
eral  attitude  prevented  me  from  fully  estimating.  My 
mother  too,  to  whom  I  wrote  my  decision  as  soon  as 
I  had  arrived  at  it,  contributed  to  the  exasperated 
sense  I  had  of  having  every  step  toward  the  fulfil 
ment  of  my  natural  gift  dragged  at  by  loving  hands, 
in  a  long  letter  designed  to  convince  me  that  a 
wife's  chief  duty  and  becomingness  lay  in  seeing  that 
nothing  of  her  lapped  over  the  bounds  prescribed  by 
her  husband's  capacity.  Poor  mother,  I  am  afraid  I 
never  quite  realized  what  a  duckling  I  turned  out  to 
her,  nor  with  what  magnanimity  she  faced  it. 

"But  I  suppose  you  think  you  are  doing  right," 
she  wrote  at  the  end,  and  then  in  a  postscript,  "I 
read  in  the  papers  there  is  a  church  in  New  York 
that  gives  communion  to  actors,  but  I  don't  expect 
you  will  get  as  far  as  that. " 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  185 

It  was  finally  Miss  Rathbone  who  relieved  the  situ 
ation  by  pulling  Tommy  over  to  a  consenting  frame 
of  mind  in  consideration  of  the  neat  little  plumlet  she 
extracted  from  it  for  herself  by  making  me  a  travel 
ling  dress  in  three  days.  She  brought  it  down  to 
the  house  for  me  to  try  on,  and  it  was  pathetic  to  see 
the  way  my  husband  hung  upon  the  effect  she  made 
for  him  of  turning  me  out  in  a  way  that  was  a 
credit  to  them  both. 

"You'll  see,"  she  seemed  to  be  saying  to  him  by 
nothing  more  explicit  than  an  exclamation  full  of 
pins  and  a  clever  way  of  squinting  at  the  hang  of  my 
skirt,  "that  when  we  two  take  a  hand  at  the  affairs 
of  the  great  world  we  can  come  up  to  the  best  of 
them."  And  all  the  time  I  could  hear  the  Higgle- 
ston  ladies  drumming  up  trade  for  her  out  of  Newton 
Centre  with  their  "Stylish?  Oh,  very.  She  makes 
all  her  clothes  for  Mrs.  Betters  worth  —  Olivia  Latti- 
more,  the  actress,  you  know." 

Just  at  the  end  though,  when  we  were  lying  in  bed 
the  last  morning,  afraid  to  go  to  sleep  again  lest  we 
shouldn't  get  up  early  enough  to  catch  the  train,  I 
believe  if  Tommy  had  risen  superior  to  his  traditional 
objection  to  a  married  woman  having  interests  out 
side  her  home,  and  claimed  me  by  some  strong 
personal  need  of  his  own,  I  should  have  answered  it 
gladly.  The  trouble  with  my  husband's  need  of  me 
was  that  it  left  too  much  over. 

"But  of  course,"  he  reminded  me  at  the  station, 


186  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"you  can  give  it  up  any  minute  if  you  want  to." 
I  think  quite  to  the  last  he  hoped  I  would  rise  to 
some  such  generous  pretence  and  come  back  to  him, 
but  we  neither  of  us  had  much  notion  of  the  nature 
of  a  player's  contract. 

I  had  arranged  to  stay  with  Pauline  until  I  could 
look  about  me,  and  from  the  little  that  I  had  been 
able  to  tell  her  of  my  affairs  I  could  see  she  was  in  a 
flutter  what  to  think  of  me.  During  the  five  days  I 
was  in  her  house  I  watched  her  swing  through  a 
whole  arc  of  possible  attitudes,  to  settle  with  truly 
remarkable  instinct  on  the  one  which  her  own  future 
permitted  her  most  consistently  to  maintain. 

"You  dear,  ridiculous  child,"  she  hovered  over  the 
point  with  indulgent  patronage,  "what  will  you  think 
of  next?" 

Pauline  herself  was  going  through  a  phase  at  the 
time.  They  had  moved  out  to  a  detached  house  at 
Evanston  on  account  of  its  being  better  for  the  baby, 
and  there  was  a  visible  diminution  of  her  earlier  effect 
of  housewifely  efficiency,  in  view  of  Henry's  growing 
prosperity.  You  could  see  all  Pauline's  surfaces  like 
a  tulip  bed  in  February,  budding  toward  a  new  esti 
mate  of  her  preciousness  in  terms  of  her  husband's 
income.  When  she  took  me  by  the  shoulders,  hold 
ing  me  off  from  her  to  give  play  to  the  pose  of  amused, 
affectionate  bewilderment,  I  could  see  just  where  the 
consciousness  of  a  more  acceptable  femininity,  as 
evinced  by  her  being  provided  with  a  cook  and  a 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  187 

housemaid,  prompted  her  to  this  gracious  glozing  of 
my  not  being  in  quite  so  fortunate  a  case.  I  was  to 
be  the  Wonder,  the  sport  on  the  feminine  bush, 
dear  and  extenuated,  made  adorably  not  to  feel  my 
excluding  variation;  an  attitude  not  uncommon  in 
wives  of  well-to-do  husbands  toward  women  who 
work.  It  was  an  attitude  successfully  kept  up  by 
Pauline  Mills  for  as  long  as  I  provided  her  the  oc 
casion.  Just  at  first  I  suspect  I  rather  contributed 
to  it  by  my  own  feeling  of  its  being  such  a  tremen 
dous  adventure  for  me,  Olivia  Lattimore,  with 
Taylorville,  Hadley's  pasture  and  the  McGee  chil 
dren  behind  me,  to  be  going  on  the  stage.  How  I 
exulted  in  it  all!  the  hall  bedroom  where  I  finally 
settled  across  from  Sarah  Croyden,  the  worry  of 
rehearsals,  the  baked  smell  of  the  streets  bored 
through  by  the  raw  lake  winds,  the  beckoning  night 
lights  —  the  vestibule  of  doors  opening  on  the 
solemn  splendour  of  the  world. 

At  the  rehearsals  I  met  Cecelia  Brune,  if  anything 
prettier  than  before,  and  quite  perceptibly  harder, 
and  Jimmy  Vantine,  still  in  love  with  her,  still  with 
his  bald  crown  not  quite  clean  and  the  same  objec 
tionable  habit  of  sidling  about,  fingering  one's  dress, 
laying  hands  on  one  as  he  talked.  I  met  Manager 
OTarrell,  not  a  whit  altered,  and  Miss  Laurine  Dean. 
I  liked  and  I  didn't  like  her.  She  drew  by  a  certain 
warm  charm  of  personality  that  repelled  in  closer 
quarters  by  its  odour  of  sickliness.  There  was  a 


188  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

quality  in  her  beauty  as  of  a  flower  kept  too 
long  in  its  glass,  not  so  much  withered  as  ready  to 
fall  apart.  She  had  small  appealing  hands,  such  as 
moved  one  to  take  them  up  and  handle  them,  yet 
served  somehow  to  mitigate  a  subtle  impression  of 
impropriety  conveyed  by  her  slight  sidewise  smile. 
She  was  probably  good-natured  by  temperament 
and  peevish  through  excessive  use  of  cigarettes. 
She  made  a  point  of  always  speaking  well  of  every 
body,  but  it  was  a  long  time  before  I  learned  that  no 
sort  of  blame  was  so  deadly  as  her  commendation. 
"Such  a  beautiful  woman  Miss  Croyden  is,"  she 
^ would  say,  "isn't  it  a  pity  about  her  nose,"  and 
though  I  had  never  thought  of  Sarah's  nose  as  mili 
tating  against  her  perfection,  after  that  I  found  my 
self  thinking  of  it.  You  could  see  that  magnanimity, 
which  was  her  chosen  attitude,  was  often  a  strain  to 
her.  I  do  not  think  she  had  any  gift  at  all,  but  she 
had  a  perception  of  it  that  had  enabled  her  to  pro 
duce  a  very  tolerable  imitation  of  acting  and  kept 
her,  in  a  covert  way,  inordinately  jealous  of  the  gift 
in  others.  She  was  jealous  of  mine. 

It  was  not  all  at  once  I  discovered  it.  In  the 
beginning,  because  I  never  detected  her  in  any  of  the 
obvious  snatchings  of  lines  and  positions  that  went 
on  at  rehearsals,  and  even  making  a  stand  for  me 
against  incursions  into  my  part  which  I  was  too 
unaccustomed  to  forestall,  I  thought  of  her  as  being 
of  rather  better  strain  than  most  of  the  company.  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  189 

was  probably  the  only  member  of  it  unaware  of  her 
deliberate  measures  not  to  permit  me  such  a  footing 
as  might  lead  to  my  supplanting  her  with  Manager 
OTarrell,  toward  whom  I  began  to  find  myself  in 
what,  for  me,  was  an  interesting  and  charming  re 
lation.  It  was  a  relation  I  should  have  been  glad 
to  maintain  with  any  member  of  the  company,  but 
it  was  only  O'Farrell  who  found  himself  equal  to  it. 
I  was  full  and  effervescing  with  the  joy  of  creation; 
night  by  night  as  I  felt  the  working  of  the  living 
organism  we  should  have  been,  transmitting  supernal 
energies  of  emotion  to  the  audience,  who  by  the  very 
communicating  act  became  a  part  of  us,  I  felt  myself 
also  warming  toward  my  fellow  players.  I  was  so 
charged  I  should  have  struck  a  spark  from  any  one 
of  them  when  we  met,  but  for  the  fact  that  by  degrees 
I  discovered  that  they  presented  to  me  the  negative 
pole. 

I  was  aware  of  such  communicating  fluid  be 
tween  particular  pairs  of  them.  I  saw  it  spark  from 
eye  to  eye,  heard  it  break  in  voices;  it  flashed  like 
sheet  lightning  about  our  horizons  on  occasions  of 
great  triumph;  but  I  was  distinctly  alive  to  the  fact 
that  the  medium  by  which  it  was  accomplished  was 
turned  from  me.  At  times  I  was  brushed  by  the 
wing  of  a  suspicion  that,  among  the  men,  there  was 
something  almost  predetermined  in  their  denial  of 
what  was  for  me  the  sympathetic,  creative  impulse. 
I  was  a  little  ashamed  for  them  of  the  gaucherie  of 


190  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

withholding  what  seemed  so  important  to  our  com 
mon  success,  and  yet  I  seemed  always  to  be  surpris 
ing  all  of  them  at  it,  except  Jimmy  Vantine  and  the 
manager.  I  couldn't  of  course,  on  account  of  his 
propensity  for  laying  hands  on  one,  take  it  from 
Jimmy,  but  between  Mr.  O'Farrell  and  me  it  ran 
with  a  pleasant,  profitable  warmth.  I  was  con 
scious  always  of  acting  better  the  scenes  I  had  with 
him.  The  thrill  of  them  was  never  quite  broken  in 
off-the-stage  hours.  I  felt  myself  sustained  by  it. 
For  one  thing  the  man  had  genuine  talent,  and  I 
think  besides  Sarah  Croyden  and  Jimmy  Vantine, 
no  one  else  in  the  company  had  very  much.  Jimmy 
had  a  gift,  besmeared  and  discredited  by  his  own 
cheapness,  but  O'Farrell  had  a  real  flowing  genius 
and  a  degree  of  personal  vitality  that  sketched  him 
out  as  by  fire  from  the  flat  Taylorville  types  I  had 
known.  We  used  to  talk  together  about  my  own 
possibilities  and  I  had  many  helpful  hints  from  him, 
but  in  spite  of  this  friendliness  I  never  made  any 
way  with  him  against  Miss  Dean.  Not  that  I  tried, 
but  by  degrees  I  found  that  suggestions  made  and 
favours  asked,  were  granted  or  accepted  on  the  basis 
of  their  non-interference  with  our  leading  lady.  I 
was  not  without  intimations,  which  I  usually  disre 
garded  because  I  found  their  conclusions  impossible 
to  maintain,  that  she  even  triumphed  over  me  in  little 
matters  too  inconsiderable  to  have  been  taken  into 
account  except  on  the  understanding  that  we  were 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  191 

pitted  in  a  deliberate  rivalry.  I  was  hurt  and 
amazed  at  times  to  discover  that  we  presented  this 
aspect  to  the  rest  of  the  company.  I  felt  that  I  was 
being  judged  by  my  conduct  of  a  business  in  which 
I  was  not  engaged. 

The  situation,  however,  had  not  developed  to  such 
a  pitch  by  the  time  we  played  in  Kincade,  that  it 
could  affect  my  pleasure  in  the  visit  Tommy  paid 
me  there;  I  was  overjoyed  to  have  the  arms  of  my 
own  man  about  me  again;  I  was  proud  of  his  pride  in 
my  success  as  Polly  Eccles,  and  pleased  to  have  him 
and  Sarah  pleased  with  one  another.  I  thought  then 
that  if  I  could  only  have  Tommy  and  my  work  I 
should  ask  no  more  of  destiny;  I  do  not  now  see  why 
I  couldn't,  but  I  like  best  to  think  of  him  as  he 
seemed  to  me  then,  wholesome  and  good,  raised  by 
his  joy  of  our  reunion  almost  to  my  excited  plane, 
generous  in  his  sharing  of  my  triumphs.  It  seemed 
for  the  moment  to  put  my  feet  quite  on  solid  ground. 
I  knew  at  last  where  I  was. 

It  was  about  a  month  after  this  that  I  began  to 
find  myself  pitted  against  Miss  Dean  in  a  struggle 
for  some  dimly  grasped  advantage,  with  the  dice 
cogged  against  me.  I  saw  myself  in  the  general  esti 
mate,  convinced  of  handling  my  game  badly,  and 
could  form  no  guess  even  at  the  expected  moves.  I 
smarted  under  a  sense  that  Manager  O'Farrell  was 
not  backing  up  the  friendliness  of  our  relations,  and 
I  remember  saying  to  Sarah  Croyden  once  that  I 


192  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

suspected  Miss  Dean  was  using  her  sex  attraction 
against  me,  but  I  missed  the  point  of  Sarah's  slow, 
commiserating  smile.  At  the  time  we  were  all  more 
or  less  swamped  by  the  discomforts  of  our  wintry 
flights  from  town  to  town,  execrable  hotels,  irregular 
and  unsatisfying  meals.  One  and  another  of  us 
went  down  with  colds,  and  finally  toward  the  end  of 
February,  I  was  taken  with  a  severe  neuralgia.  It 
reached  its  acutest  stage  the  first  night  we  played 
at  Louisville. 

I  had  hurried  home  from  the  theatre  the  moment 
I  was  released  from  my  part,  to  find  relief  from  it  in 
rest,  but  an  hour  or  two  later,  still  suffering  and  dis 
covering  that  I  had  taken  all  my  powders,  I  decided 
to  go  down  to  Sarah's  room  on  the  lower  floor  to 
ask  for  some  that  I  knew  she  had.  I  slipped  on  my 
shoes  and  a  thick  gray  dressing  gown,  and  taking  the 
precaution  of  wrapping  my  head  in  a  shawl  against 
the  draughty  halls,  I  went  down  to  her.  I  was  re 
turning  with  the  box  of  powders  in  my  hand  when  I 
was  startled  by  the  sound  of  a  door  lifting  carefully 
on  the  latch.  The  hotel  was  built  in  the  shape  of  a 
capital  T,  with  the  stair  halfway  of  the  stem.  I  was 
almost  at  the  foot  of  it  facing  the  cross  hall  that  gave 
me  a  view  of  the  door  of  Miss  Dean's  room,  and  I 
saw  now  that  it  was  slightly  ajar.  I  shrank  in 
stinctively  into  the  shadow  of  the  recess  where  the 
stair  began,  for  I  was  unwilling  that  anybody  should 
see  the  witch  I  looked  in  my  dressing  gown  and  shawl. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  193 

In  the  interval  before  the  door  widened  I  heard  the 
tick  of  a  tin-faced  clock  just  across  from  me.  Part 
of  the  enamel  was  fallen  away  from  the  face  of  it  so 
that  it  looked  as  if  eaten  upon  by  discreditable 
sores;  a  chandelier  holding  two  smoky  kerosene 
lamps  hung  slightly  awry  at  the  crossing  of  the  T,' 
and  cast  a  tipsy  shadow.  The  door  swung  back 
slightly;  it  opened  into  the  room,  and  a  man  came 
out  of  it  and  crossed  directly  in  front  of  me,  probably 
to  his  own  room  in  the  other  arm  of  the  T. 

Once  out  of  the  door  it  snapped  softly  to  behind 
him,  and  the  man  fell  instantly  into  a  manner  that 
disconnected  him  with  it  to  a  degree  that  could  only 
have  been  possible  to  an  accomplished  actor.  If  I 
had  not  seen  him  come  out  of  it,  I  should  have  sup 
posed  him  abroad  upon  such  a  casual  errand  as  my 
own 

But  there  was  no  mistaking  that  it  was  Manager 
O'Farrell.  By  the  tin-faced  clock  it  was  a  quarter 
past  one.  And  he  would  have  been  home  from  the 
theatre  more  than  an  hour! 

I  got  up  to  my  room  somehow;  I  think  my  neu 
ralgia  must  have  left  me  with  the  shock;  I  can't  re 
member  feeling  it  any  more  after  that.  You  have  to 
remember  that  this  was  my  first  actual  contact  with 
sin  of  any  sort.  Generations  of  the  stock  of  Meth 
odism  revolted  in  me.  I  had  liked  the  man,  I  had 
thought  of  our  relation  as  something  precious,  to  be 
kept  intact  because  it  nourished  the  quality  of  our 


194  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

art,  and  I  had  all  the  conventional  woman's  horror 
of  being  brought  in  touch  with  looseness.  It  was 
part  of  the  admitted  business  of  the  men  of  my  class 
to  keep  their  women  from  such  contacts,  and  Man 
ager  O'Farrell  had  allowed  me  to  enter  into  a  sort  of 
rivalry  with  a  shameless  woman  —  with  his  mistress. 

I  have  always  been  what  the  country  people  in 
Ohianna  call  a  knowledgable  woman,  I  have  not 
much  faculty  of  getting  news  of  a  situation  through 
the  facts  as  they  present  themselves,  but  I  have  in 
stincts  which  under  the  stimulus  of  emotion  work 
with  extraordinary  celerity  and  thoroughness.  Now 
suddenly  the  half -apprehended  suggestion  of  the  last 
few  months  took  fire  from  the  excitement  of  my  mind, 
and  exploded  into  certainties.  I  sensed  all  at  once 
intolerable  things,  the  withholden  eyes,  the  covert  at 
tention  fixed  on  my  relations  with  the  manager  and 
Miss  Dean.  I  lay  on  the  bed  and  shuddered  with 
dry  sobs;  other  times  I  lay  still,  awake  and  blazing. 
About  daylight  Sarah  came  up  to  inquire  how  my 
neuralgia  did.  She  found  me  with  the  unopened  box 
clutched  tightly  in  my  hand.  She  turned  up  the 
smoky  gas  and  noted  the  dark  circles  under  my  eyes. 

"What  has  happened?  Something,  I  know,"  she 
insisted  gently.  I  blurted  it  out. 

"Mr.  O'Farrell  ...  I  saw  him  come  out  of  Miss 
Dean's  room  ...  at  a  quarter  of  one.  He  was  .  .  . 
oh,  Sarah  ...  he  was!  .  .  .  ."  I  relapsed  again 
into  the  horror  of  it. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  195 


"Oh!"  she  said.  She  turned  out  the  light  and 
came  and  forced  me  gently  under  the  covers  and  got 
into  bed  beside  me. 

"Didn't  you  know?"  she  questioned. 

"Did  you?" 

"No  one  really  knows  these  things.  I  didn't  want 
to  be  the  first  to  suggest  it  to  you." 

"Do  the  others  know?" 

"As  much  as  we  do.  It  has  been  going  on  a  long 
time." 

"And  you  put  up  with  it  —  you  go  about  with 
them?"  I  was  astonished  at  the  welling  up  of  dis 
gust  in  me.  Sarah  felt  for  my  hand  and  held  it. 

"My  dear,  in  our  business  you  have  to  learn  to 
take  no  notice.  It  is  not  that  these  things  are  so 
much  worse  with  actors,  but  it  is  more  difficult  to 
keep  them  covered  up.  You  must  know  that  a 
great  many  people  do  such  things." 

"I  know  —  wicked  people.  I  never  thought  of  its 
being  done  by  anybody  you  liked." 

"Oh,  yes;"  she  was  perfectly  simple.  "You  can 
like  them,  you  can  like  them  greatly."  I  remem 
bered  that  I  oughtn't  to  have  said  that  to  Sarah 
Croyden. 

"You  mustn't  think  Mr.  O'Farrell  such  a  bad 
man.  He  is  probably  fond  of  her.  In  some  respects 
he  is  a  very  good  man.  When  I  was  —  left,  with 
out  a  penny,  he  might  have  made  terms  with  me. 
Some  managers  would.  But  he  gave  me  a  living 


196  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

salary  and  left  me  to  myself.  He  has  been  very 
kind  to  me." 

"But  she "  I  choked  back  my  sick  resent 
ment  to  get  at  what  had  been  tearing  its  way  through 
my  consciousness  for  the  last  three  hours.  "She 
must  have  thought  that  that  was  what  I  wanted  of 
him.  ..." 

"Well,  it  is  natural  she  should  be  anxious,  with 
other  women  about.  She  is  in  love  with  him." 

"Did  you  think  so?    About  me,  I  mean?" 

"No,"  said  Sarah.     "No,  I  didn't  think  so." 

It  was  light  enough  now  to  show  the  outline  of  the 
drifts  along  the  sills  and  the  fine  gritty  powder  which 
the  wind  dashed  intermittently  against  the  panes; 
the  filter  of  day  under  the  scant  blinds  brought  out  in 
the  affair  streaks  of  vulgarity  as  evident  as  the  pat 
tern  of  the  paper  on  the  wall.  It  seemed  to  borrow 
cheapness  from  the  broken  castor  of  the  bureau,  as 
from  my  recollection  of  the  eaten  face  of  the  clock 
and  the  leaning  chandelier.  I  sat  up  in  the  bed  and 
laid  hold  of  Sarah  in  my  eagerness  to  get  clear  of  what 
by  my  mere  knowledge  of  it,  seemed  an  unbearable 
complicity. 

"I  had  a  feeling  for  him,"  I  admitted.  "I  could 
act  better  with  him;  but  it  was  different  from  that  — 
you  know  it  was  different." 

"Yes,"  said  Sarah,  "I  know.  I  know  because  I 
am  that  way  myself;  it  is  like  that,  but  it  isn't  that." 
I  was  still,  holding  my  breath  while  she  considered; 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  197 

we  were  very  close  upon  the  twined  roots  of  sex  and 
art. 

"There's  a  feeling  that  goes  with  acting,  with 
other  sorts  of  things,  painting  and  music,  maybe,  a 
feeling  of  your  wanting  to  get  through  to  something 
and  lay  hold  of  it,  and  your  not  being  able  to  leaves 
you  .  .  .  aching  somehow,  and  you  think  if  there's  a 
particular  person  ...  I  think  O'Farrell  would  under 
stand  .  .  .  it  is  being  able  to  act  makes  you  know  the 
difference  I  suppose.  He  really  can  act  you  know, 
and  you  can,  but  Dean  wouldn't  understand,  nor  the 
others.  My  —  Mr.  Lawrence  didn't  understand!" 
It  was  the  first  time  she  had  ever  mentioned  him  to 
me.  "Sometimes  I  think  they  might  have  felt  the 
difference  just  at  first,  but  nobody  told  them  and 
they  got  used  to  thinking  it  is  ...  the  other  thing." 
She  drew  me  down  into  the  bed  again  and  covered 
me.  "You  mustn't  take  it  to  hard  .  .  .  we  all  go 
through  it  once  .  .  .  and  you  are  safe  so  long  as 
you  know." 

"But  I  can't  go  on  with  it."  I  was  positive  on 
that  point.  "Sarah,  Sarah,  don't  say  I  have  to  go 
on  with  it." 

"I  know  you  can't.    But  you  just  have  to." 

"I  should  never  be  able  to  face  either  of  them 
again  without  showing  that  I  know." 

"And  then  the  others  will  know  and  they  will 
think  ..." 

I  threw  out  my  arms,  seeing  how  I  was  trapped.     I 


198  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

wanted  to  cry  out  on  them;  to  despise  the  woman 
openly.  "And  they  will  think  that  I  am  jealous 
.  .  .  that  I  wanted  it  myself.  .  .  .  ' 

I  rolled  in  the  bed  and  bit  my  hands  with  shame 
and  anger.  Sarah  caught  me  in  her  arms  and  held 
me  until  the  paroxysm  passed.  I  was  quieted  at 
last  from  exhaustion. 

"You  can  stay  in  your  room  to-day,"  she  sug 
gested.  "I  can  bring  your  meals  up  to  you;  this 
neuralgia  will  give  you  an  excuse,  and  you  needn't 
see  any  one  until  you  go  to  the  theatre.  That  will 
give  you  one  day.  Maybe  by  to-morrow  .  .  .  ' 

But  I  had  no  confidence  that  to-morrow  would 
bring  me  any  sensible  relief.  The  moral  shock  was 
tremendous.  All  my  pride  was  engaged  on  the  side 
of  never  letting  anybody  know;  to  have  been  mis 
understood  in  the  quality  of  my  disgust  would  have 
been  the  intolerable  last  thing.  Sarah  brought  up  my 
breakfast  before  she  had  her  own;  she  reported  no 
body  about  yet  except  Jimmy  Vantine  who  had  in 
quired  for  me.  About  half  an  hour  later  she  came 
softly  in  again  with  a  yellow  envelope  open  in  her 
hand.  I  saw  by  her  face  that  it  was  for  me  and  that 
the  news  it  contained  put  the  present  situation  out 
of  question. 

"Is  it  from  my  husband?"  I  demanded.  I  hardly 
knew  what  I  hoped  or  expected,  a  possibility  of  re 
lease  flashed  up  in  me. 

"It  has  been  forwarded."    She  sat  down  on  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  199 

bed  beside  me.  "My  poor  Olivia  .  .  .  you  must  try 
not  to  think  of  it  as  anything  but  a  way  out.  Mr. 
O'Farrell  will  let  you  go  for  this  ....  If  it  had 
to  happen  it  couldn't  have  happened  better." 

"Give  it  to  me " 

"Remember,  it  is  a  way  out." 

I  read  it  hastily: 

Mother  had  a  stroke.    Come  at  once. 

Signed:  FORESTER. 


CHAPTER  VII 

IT  WAS  a  common  practice  in  Taylorville  never  to 
send  for  the  doctor  until  you  knew  what  was  the 
matter  with  you.  So  long  as  the  symptoms  failed 
to  align  themselves  with  any  known  disorder,  they 
were  supposed  to  be  amenable  to  neighbourly  ad 
vice,  to  the  common  stock  of  medical  misinformation, 
to  the  almanac  or  some  such  repository  of  science; 
and  though  this  practice  led  on  too  many  occasions 
to  the  disease  getting  past  the  curable  stages  before 
the  physician  was  called,  I  never  remember  to  have 
heard  it  questioned. 

"You  see,"  people  remarked  to  one  another  at 
the  funeral,  "they  didn't  know  what  was  the  matter 
with  her  until  it  was  too  late,"  and  it  passed  for  all 
extenuation.  It  was  natural  then  that  my  mother 
should  have  kept  any  premonitory  symptoms  of  her 
indisposition  even  from  Forester;  close  as  they  were 
in  their  affections  she  would  have  thought  it  indeli 
cate  to  have  spoken  to  him  of  her  health.  The  first 
determinate  stroke  of  it  came  upon  her  sitting  quietly 
in  her  usual  place  at  prayer  meeting  on  a  Wednesday 
evening. 

It  had  been  Forester's  habit  to  close  the  shop  a 
little  early  on  that  evening,  going  around  to  the 

200 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  201 

church  to  walk  home  with  her,  getting  in  before  the 
last  hymn  to  save  his  face  with  the  minister  by  a  show 
of  regular  attendance.  But  on  this  evening  cus 
tomers  detained  him  beyond  his  usual  hour,  so  that 
by  the  time  he  reached  the  corner  opposite  the  church, 
he  saw  the  people  dribbling  out  by  twos  and  threes, 
across  the  lighted  doorway,  and  noted  that  my 
mother  was  not  with  them.  He  thought  she  might 
have  slipped  out  earlier  and  gone  around  to  the  shop 
for  him  as  occasionally  happened,  but  seeing  the  lights 
did  not  go  out  at  once  in  the  church,  he  looked  in  to 
make  sure,  and  saw  her  still  sitting  in  her  accustomed 
place.  The  sexton  and  the  organist,  who  were  fussing 
together  about  a  broken  pedal,  appeared  not  to  have 
observed  her  there,  and  one  of  them  was  reaching  up 
to  put  out  the  light  when  Forester  touched  her  on 
the  shoulder.  She  started  and  seemed  to  come  awake 
with  an  effort,  and  on  the  way  home  she  stumbled 
once  or  twice  in  a  manner  that  led  him,  totally  unac 
customed  as  he  was  to  think  of  my  mother  as  ill  in 
any  sort,  to  get  a  little  entertainment  out  of  it  by 
gentle  rallying,  which  was  dropped  when  he  dis 
covered  that  it  caused  her  genuine,  pained  em 
barrassment.  The  following  Tuesday  he  came  home 
to  the  midday  meal  to  find  her  lying  on  the  floor, 
inarticulate  and  hardly  conscious.  There  must 
have  been  two  strokes  in  close  succession,  for  she  had 
managed  after  falling,  to  get  a  cushion  from  the  worn 
sitting-room  lounge  under  her  head  and  to  pull  a 


202  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

shawl  partly  over  her.  Effie,  who  was  at  Montecito, 
was  summoned  home,  and  that  evening,  by  the  doc 
tor's  advice,  the  telegram  was  sent  which  separated 
me  so  opportunely  from  the  Shamrocks.  By  the 
time  I  reached  her,  speech  had  returned  in  a  meas 
ure,  and  by  the  end  of  a  fortnight  she  was  able  to  be 
lifted  into  the  chair  which  she  never  afterward  left. 

I  remember  as  if  it  were  yesterday,  the  noble  out 
line  of  her  face  and  of  her  head  against  the  pillows,  the 
smooth  hair  parted  Madonna-wise  and  brought  low 
across  her  ears,  the  blue  of  her  eyes  looking  out  of  the 
dark,  swollen  circles,  for  all  her  fifty-two  years,  with 
the  unawakened  clarity  of  a  girl's.  Stricken  as  I 
was  from  my  first  realizing  contact  with  sin,  and  my 
identification  with  it  through  the  assumed  passions 
of  the  stage,  it  grew  upon  me  during  the  days  of  my 
mother's  illness  that  there  was  a  kind  of  intrinsic 
worth  in  her  which  I,  with  all  my  powers,  must  forever 
and  inalienably  miss.  With  it  there  came  a  kind  of 
exasperation,  never  quite  to  leave  me,  of  the  certain 
ty  of  not  choosing  my  own  values,  but  of  being 
driven  with  them  aside  and  apart. 

It  was  responsible  in  part  for  a  feeling  I  had  of 
being  somehow  less  related  to  my  mother's  house 
than  many  of  her  distant  kin  who  were  continually 
arriving  out  of  all  quarters,  in  wagons  and  top  bug 
gies,  to  express  a  continuity  of  interest  and  kind 
which  had  the  effect  of  constituting  me  definitely 
outside  the  bond. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  203 

i 
The  situation  was  furthered  no  doubt,  by  the 

whisper  of  my  connection  with  the  stage  which 
got  about  and  set  up  in  them  an  attitude  of  cir 
cumspection,  out  of  which  I  caught  them  at  times 
regarding  me  with  a  curiosity  unmixed  with  any 
human  sympathy.  Yet  I  recall  how  keen  an  appe 
tite  I  had  for  what  this  illness  of  my  mother's  had 
thrown  into  relief,  the  web  of  passionate  human 
interactions,  bone  and  body  of  the  spirituality  that 
went  clothed  as  gracelessly  in  the  routine  of  their 
daily  lives  as  the  figures  of  the  men  under  the  un-. 
yielding  ugliness  of  store  clothing.  It  came  out  inl 
the  talk  of  the  women  sitting  about  the  base  burner1 
at  night  with  their  skirts  folded  back  carefully 
across  their  knees,  in  the  watches  we  found  it  nec 
essary  to  keep  for  the  first  fortnight  or  so.  I  re 
member  one  of  these  occasions  as  the  particular, 
instance  by  which  my  mother  emerged  for  me  from 
her  condition  of  parenthood,  to  the  common  plane 
of  humanity,  by  way  of  an  old  romance  of  her's 
with  Cousin  Judd.  Cousin  Lydia  sat  up  with  her 
that  night  and  Almira  Jewett,  a  brisk,  country  clad 
woman  of  the  Skaldic  temperament  who  from  long 
handling  of  the  histories  of  her  clan  had  acquired 
an  absolute  art  of  it.  She  was  own  sister  to  the 
woman  who  married  my  mother's  half-brother,  and 
the  Saga  of  the  Judds  and  the  Wilsons  and  the  Jew- 
etts  and  the  Lattimores  ran  off  the  points  of  her 
bright  needles  as  she  sat  with  her  feet  on  the  fender, 


204  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

with  a  click  and  a  spark.  Cousin  Lydia  never 
knitted;  she  sat  with  her  hands  folded  in  her  large 
lap  and  time  seemed  to  rest  with  her. 

"It  will  be  hard  on  Judd,"  Almira  offered  to  the 
unspoken  reference  forever  in  the  air,  as  to  the  pos 
sible  fatal  termination  of  my  mother's  illness. 

"Yes,  it'll  be  hard  on  him."  A  faint,  so  faint 
nuance  of  assent  in  Cousin  Lydia's  voice  seemed  to 
admit  the  succeeding  comment,  shorn  of  imper 
tinence.  I  guessed  that  the  several  members  of  the 
tribe  were  relieved  rather  than  constrained  to  drop 
their  intimate  concerns  into  Almira  Jewett's  im 
partial  histories. 

"I  never,"  Almira  invited,  "did  get  the  straight 
of  that.  Sally  was  engaged  to  him,  warn't  she?" 

"Not  to  say  engaged,"  Cousin  Lydia  paused  for 
just  the  right  shade  of  relation,  "but  so  as  to  want  to 
be.  Judd  set  store  by  her;  he'd  have  had  it  that 
way  anyway,  but  Sally  couldn't  make  up  her  mind 
to  it  on  account  of  their  being  own  cousins." 

"I  reckon  she  had  the  right  of  it;  the  Lord  don't 
seem  no  way  pleased  with  kin  marrying." 

"I  don't  know,  I  don't  know;"  Cousin  Lydia 
dropped  the  speculation  into  the  pit  of  her  own  ex 
perience.  "It  looks  like  He  wouldn't  have  made 
'em  to  care  about  it  then.  But  being  as  she  saw  it 
that  way,  they  couldn't  have  done  different.  Not 
that  Judd  didn't  see  it  in  the  light  of  his  duty, 
too."  There  was  evidently  nothing  in  the  annals  of 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  205 

the  Judds  and  the  Lattimores  which  allowed  a  vio 
lation  of  the  inward  monitor. 

"Well,  I  must  say,  he  has  turned  it  into  grace,  if 
ever  a  man  has.  Not  to  say  but  what  you've  helped 
him  to  it."  It  was  in  the  manner  of  Almira's  con 
cession,  if  not  in  the  matter,  that  Cousin  Judd  had 
chosen  Lydia  chiefly  for  her  quality  of  not  offering  any 
distraction  to  his  profounder  passion,  which  nothing 
in  Cousin  Lydia's  comment  denied.  From  the  room 
beyond  we  could  hear  the  inarticulate,  half -conscious 
notice  of  my  mother's  pain.  Cousin  Lydia  moved 
to  attend  her. 

"All  these  years,"  I  whispered  to  Almira,  "she 
has  loved  him  and  he  has  loved  my  mother!"  I  was 
pierced  through  with  the  pure  sword  of  the  spirit 
which  had  divided  them.  But  Almira  was  more 
practical. 

"She  was  better  off,"  Almira  insisted.  "Lydia 
hadn't  no  knack  with  men  folk,  ever.  She  knew 
Judd  wouldn't  have  loved  her,  but  so  long  as  he 
loved  your  mother  she  was  safe.  They  got  a  good 
deal  out  of  it,  her  knowing  and  sympathizing.  She 
could  sympathize,  you  see,  for  she  knew  how  it  was 
herself,  loving  Judd  that  way.  It  was  no  more  than 
right  they  should  get  what  they  could  out  of  it.  It 
was  the  only  thing  they  had  between  them." 

"All  those  years!"  I  said  again.  I  felt  myself 
immeasurably  lifted  out  of  the  mists  and  mires  of 
the  Shamrocks  into  clear  and  aching  atmospheres. 


206  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"I  will  say  this  for  Lydia,"  extenuated  the  Skald, 
"that  though  she  hadn't  no  gift  to  draw  a  man  to 
her,  she  knew  how  to  hold  her  hand  off  and  let  him 
go  his  own  thought.  It  was  religion  kept  your 
mother  and  Judd  apart,  and  yet  it  was  in  religion 
they  comforted  one  another.  Lydia  never  put  her 
self  forward  like  she  might,  claiming  it  was  her  re 
ligion  too.  And  she  was  one  that  appreciated  church 
privileges." 

But  I  wondered  where  my  father  came  in.  It  had 
been,  I  knew,  a  passionate  attachment. 

"Like  a  new  house,"  said  Almira,  "built  up  where 
the  old  one  has  been,  but  the  cellars  of  it  don't 
change.  Real  loving  is  never  really  got  over."  I 
felt  the  phrase  sounding  in  some  subterranean  crypt 
of  my  own. 

With  this  new  light  on  it,  it  came  out  for  me  won 
derfully  in  my  mother's  face,  as  I  watched  her 
through  the  anxious  days,  how  much  her  life  had  been 
stayed  in  renunciations.  I  suppose  my  new  appreci 
ation  must  have  shone  out  for  her  as  well,  for  I  could 
see  rising  out  of  her  disorder,  like  a  drowned  body 
from  the  sea,  the  bond  of  our  common  experience. 
We  were  two  women,  together  at  last,  my  mother 
and  I,  and  could  have  speech  with  one  another. 

Something  no  doubt  contributed  to  this  new 
understanding  by  an  affair  of  Forester's  which,  ass  I 
began  to  be  acquainted  with  the  incidents  preceding 
it,  I  believed  to  be  partly  responsible  for  my  mother's 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  207 

stroke.  I  have  already  sketched  to  you  how  Fores 
ter  had  grown  up  in  the  need  of  finding  himself  al 
ways  at  the  centre  of  feminine  interest  without  the 
opportunity  of  satisfying  it  normally  by  marriage, 
and  how  the  too  early  stimulation  of  sentiment  and 
affection  had  led  to  his  being  handed  about  from  girl 
to  girl  in  the  attempt  to  gratify  his  need  without 
transgressing  any  of  the  lines  marked  out  by  his 
profession  as  an  eminently  nice  young  man.  It  came 
naturally  out  of  the  mere  circumstance  of  there  being 
a  limited  number  of  girls  at  hand  whom  he  might 
conceivably  court  without  the  intention  of  marrying, 
for  him  to  fall  into  the  society  of  others  whom  he 
might  not  court  but  who  might  nevertheless  find  it 
much  to  their  advantage  to  marry  him. 

I  do  not  know  how  and  when  it  came  to  my 
mother's  ears  that  he  was  calling  frequently  at  the 
Jastrows;  very  likely  they  brought  it  to  her  notice 
themselves.  They  were  a  poor,  pushing  sort,  for 
ever  exposing  themselves  to  the  slights  arising  from 
their  own  undesirability,  which  they  forever  tear 
fully  attributed  to  an  undeserved  and  paraded 
poverty.  They  paraded  it  now  as  the  insuperable 
bar  to  all  that  they  might  have  done  for  my  mother, 
all  that  they  actually  had  it  in  their  hearts  to  do  on 
their  assumption  of  a  right  of  being  interested,  an 
assumption  which,  even  in  her  weakness,  before  she 
could  trust  herself  to  talk  very  much,  I  felt  her 
dumbly  imploring  me  to  deny.  The  girl  —  Lily  they 


208  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

called  her  —  was  not  without  a  certain  appeal  to  the 
senses;  and  knowing  rather  more  of  my  brother's 
methods,  I  did  not  find  Mrs.  Jastrow's  pretension 
to  a  community  of  interest  in  what  might  be  ex 
pected  to  come  of  his  attention,  altogether  unjusti 
fied.  But  in  view  of  mother's  condition  and  what 
Effie  told  me  of  the  way  business  was  going  —  rather 
was  not  going  at  all  —  any  kind  of  marriage  would 
have  been  out  of  the  question.  It  was  the  way  I  put 
the  finality  of  that  into  my  dealings  with  Mrs.  Jas- 
trow,  that  drew  mother  over  into  the  only  relation  of 
normal  human  interdependence  I  was  ever  to  have 
with  her.  Whenever  Mrs.  Jastrow  would  come  to  call 
with  that  air  she  had,  in  her  dress  and  manner,  of 
being  pulled  together  and  made  the  best  of,  I  could 
see  my  mother's  fears  signalling  to  me  from  the  region 
of  tremors  and  f  aintness  in  which  she  had  sunk,  and 
I  would  set  my  wits  up  as  a  defence  against  what, 
considering  all  there  was  against  her,  was  a  really 
gallant  effort  on  Mrs.  Jastrow's  part  to  make  out  of 
Forester's  philanderings  a  basis  for  a  family  intimacy. 
It  was  plain  that  neither  my  mother  nor  Mrs.  Jastrow 
dared  put  the  question  to  Forester,  but  rested  their 
case  on  such  mutual  admissions  of  it  as  they  could 
wring  from  one  another. 

I  could  never  make  out  on  my  mother's  side, 
whether  she  was  really  afraid  of  the  issue,  or  if  in 
the  preoccupation  of  their  affection  both  she  and 
Forester  had  overlooked  his  young  man's  right  to  a 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  209 

woman  and  a  life  of  his  own.  Through  all  her  dumb 
struggle  against  it,  never  but  once  did  my  mother 
openly  face  the  ultimate  possibility  of  his  marriage 
with  Lily  Jastrow. 

It  was  about  the  third  week  of  her  illness,  and  Mrs. 
Jastrow,  making  one  of  her  interminable  calls,  had 
been  brought  so  nearly  to  the  point  of  tears  by  my 
imperiousness,  that  Effie .  had  been  obliged  to  draw 
her  off  into  the  kitchen  to  have  her  opinion  about  a 
recipe  for  a  mince  meat  such  as  she  knew  the  Jas- 
trows  couldn't  afford  to  be  instructed  in,  and  so  had 
gotten  her  out  of  the  side  door  and  started  down  the 
walk  before  the  situation  could  come  to  a  head.  My 
mother  watched  her  go. 

"Do  you  think,"  she  hazarded  suddenly,  "that 
Forester  really  is  engaged  to  her?" 

"To  Lily?  Oh,  no;  Forester  doesn't  get  engaged 
to  girls,  he  just  —  dangles."  It  was  characteristic 
of  my  mother's  partiality  that  even  damaging  insin 
uations  such  as  this,  slid  off  from  it  as  too  far  from 
the  possibility  to  be  even  entertained.  Perhaps  a 
trace  of  my  old  exasperation  with  the  whole  situa 
tion,  and  the  glimpse  I  had  of  Mrs.  Jastrow  letting 
herself  out  of  our  gate  with  her  assumption  of  being 
as  good  as  anybody  still  to  the  fore  but  a  little  awry, 
prompted  me  to  add: 

"And  it  is  only  natural  for  her  mother  to  make  the 
most  of  it.  She's  looking  out  for  her  own,  just  as 
you  are." 


210  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"A  mother  has  a  right  to  do  that;"  she  protested, 
"to  keep  them  from  making  themselves  miserable.' 
It  is  no  more  than  her  duty." 

"Yes,"  I  said,  My  remark  had  the  effect  of  a 
challenge. 

"Young  people  don't  know  how  to  choose  for 
themselves;  they  make  mistakes."  She  revolved 
something  in  her  mind.  "You,  now  .  .  .  you're 
happy,  aren't  you,  Olivia?" 

"Yes;  oh,  yes."  I  had  not  thought  of  myself  as 
being  so  particularly,  but  I  did  not  see  my  way  to 
deny  it. 

"I've  been  afraid  .  .  .  sometimes  .  .  .  since  you 
wrote  me  about  going  on  the  stage,  maybe  you 
weren't  exactly  .  .  .  satisfied.  But  it  isn't  that,  is 
it?" 

"No,  mother,  it  isn't  that." 

"There!  You  see!"  She  shook  off  her  weakness 
with  the  conviction.  "And  you  mightn't  have  been 
if  I  hadn't  looked  out  for  you  a  little." 

"Why,  mother,  what  could  you  possibly " 

She  triumphed. 

"You  remember  that  Garrett  boy  that  was  visiting 
at  his  uncle's?  He  called  that  night;  the  night  you 
were  engaged  to  Tommy." 

"Yes,  I  remember.    You  sent  him  away?" 

"He  wasn't  suitable  at  all  .  .  .  smoking, and  driv 
ing  about  on  Sunday  that  way  .  .  .  .  Her  tone 
was  defensive.  "He  left  a  letter  that  night " 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  211 

"Mother!    You  didn't  tell  me!" 

"I  was  thinking  it  over  ...  I  had  a  right  .  .  . 
you  were  too  young!" 

"Mother  ...  did  you  read  it?" 

"I  .  .  .  looked  at  it.  You  hadn't  met  him  but 
once  and  I  had  a  right  to  know;  and  that  night  you 
were  engaged.  I  took  it  for  a  sign." 

"And  the  letter?"  It  seemed  all  at  once  an  im 
measurable  and  irreparable  loss. 

"I  sent  it  back  .  .  .  and,  anyway,  it  turned  out 
all  right."  I  was  possessed  for  the  moment  with 
the  conviction  that  it  was  all  dreadfully,  despair 
ingly  wrong. 

"I  couldn't  have  borne  for  you  to  marry  anybody 
but  a  Christian,  Olivia!"  I  thought  of  Tommy's 
exceedingly  slender  claim  to  that  distinction  and  I 
laughed. 

"Tommy  smokes,"  I  said;  "he  says  he  has  to  do  it 
with  the  customers." 

"Oh,  but  not  as  a  habit,  Olivia."  I  overrode 
that. 

"Tell  me  what  became  of  him  —  of  Mr.  Garrett. 
Did  you  ever  hear?" 

"He  went  West,"  she  recollected;  "I  asked  his 
aunt.  He  quarrelled  with  them  because  his  uncle 
wouldn't  send  him  to  school.  At  his  age  they 
thought  it  wasn't  suitable.  I  wouldn't  have  wanted 
you  to  go  West,  Olivia." 

I  took  her  worn  hands  in  mine.     "It's  all  right, 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

mother.  I'm  not  going  West.  And  I'm  not  going 
on  the  stage  any  more.  I'm  done  with  it."  I  felt 
so,  passionately,  at  the  time.  We  sat  quietly  for  a 
time  in  that  assurance  and  listened  to  Effie  singing 
in  the  kitchen. 

"Olivia,"  she  began  timidly  at  last,  "aren't  you 
ever  going  to  have  any  more  children?" 

"Oh,  I  hope  so,  mother.  I  haven't  been  strong, 
you  know,  since  the  first  one.  We  didn't  think  it 
advisable." 

"Well,   if  you  can  manage  it  that  way  .  .  .   ! 
There  was  a  trace  in  her  tone  of  the  woman  who 
hadn't  been  able  to  manage.     I  wished  to  reassure 
her. 

"When  I  was  in  the  hospital  the  doctor  told 
me  .  .  .  '  I  could  see  the  deep  flush  rising  over 
her  face  and  neck;  there  were  some  things  which  her 
generation  had  never  faced.  I  let  them  fall  with 
her  hands  and  sat  gazing  at  the  red  core  of  the  base 
burner,  waiting  until  she  should  take  up  her  thought 
again. 

"I  used  to  think  those  things  weren't  right,  Olivia, 
but  I  don't  know.  Sometimes  I  think  it  isn't  right, 
either,  to  bring  them  into  the  world  when  there  is 
no  welcome  for  them."  She  struggled  with  the 
admission.  "You  and  I,  Olivia,  we  never  got  on 
together." 

"But  that's  all  past  now,  mother."  She  clung  to 
me  for  a  while  for  reassurance. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  213 

"I  hope  so,  I  hope  so;  but  still  there  are  things  I've 
always  wanted  to  tell  you.  When  you  wrote  me  about 
going  on  the  stage  ....  there  are  wild  things  in 
you,  Olivia,  things  I  never  looked  for  in  a  daughter 
of  mine,  things  I  can't  understand  nor  account  for 
unless  —  unless  it  was  I  turned  you  against  life  .  .  . 
my  kind  of  life  .  .  .  before  you  were  born.  Many's 
the  time  I've  seen  you  hating  it  and  I've  been  harsh 
with  you;  but  I  wanted  you  should  know  I  was 
being  harsh  with  myself  .  .  .  3 

"Mother,  dear,  is  it  good  for  you  to  talk  so?" 

"Yes,  yes,  I've  wanted  to.  You  see  it  was  after 
your  father  came  home  from  the  war  and  we  were 
all  broken  up.  Forester  was  sickly,  and  there  was 
the  one  that  died.  So  when  I  knew  you  were  com 
ing,  I  —  hated  you,  Olivia.  I  wanted  things  dif 
ferent.  I  hated  you  ....  until  I  heard  you  cry. 
You  cried  all  the  time  when  you  were  little,  Olivia, 
and  it  was  I  that  was  crying  in  you.  I've  expected 
some  punishment  would  come  of  it." 

"Oh,  hush,  hush  mother!  I  shouldn't  have  liked 
it  either  in  your  place.  Besides,  they  say  —  the  scien 
tists — that  it  isn't  so  that  things  before  you  are  born 
can  affect  you  as  much  as  that."  She  moved  her 
head  feebly  on  the  pillows  in  deep-rooted  denial. 

"They  can  say  that,  but  we've  never  got  on. 
There's  things  in  you  that  aren't  natural  for  any 
daughter  of  mine.  They  can  say  that,  Olivia,  but 
we  —  we  know." 


214  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Yes,  mother,  we  know." 

I  took  her  hands  again  and  nursed  them  against 
my  cheek;  after  a  time  tears  began  to  drip  down  her 
flaccid  cheeks  and  I  wiped  them  away  for  her. 

"Don't,  mother,  don't!  We  get  along  now,  any 
way  !  And  as  for  the  things  in  me  which  are  different, 
do  you  know,  mother,  I'm  getting  to  know  that  they 
are  the  best  things  in  me." 

I  honestly  thought  so;  and  after  all  these  years  I 
think  so  now. 

I  wheeled  her  into  the  bedroom  presently,  where 
she  fell  into  the  light  slumber  of  the  feeble,  and 
seemed  afterward  hardly  to  remember,  but  I  was 
glad  then  to  have  talked  it  all  out  with  her,  for 
though  she  lived  nearly  two  years  after,  before  I  saw 
her  again  another  stroke  had  deprived  her  of  articu- 
lateness.  * 


CHAPTER  VIII 

I  WENT  home  to  my  husband  after  it  began  to  seem 
certain  that  my  mother's  condition  would  not  change 
for  some  time,  but  I  knew  in  the  going  that  neither 
Tommy  nor  Higgleston  could  ever  present  them 
selves  to  me  again  in  the  aspect  of  an  absolute  des 
tiny.  By  the  incidents  of  the  past  few  weeks  I  had 
been  pulled  free  from  the  obsession  of  inevitableness 
with  which  my  life  had  clothed  itself  until  now;  I 
stood  outside  of  it  and  questioned  it  in  the  light  of 
what  it  might  have  been,  what  it  might  yet  become. 
Suppose  I  had  received  Helmeth  Garrett's  letter; 
suppose  my  interest  in  Mr.  O'Farrell  had  wavered  a 
hair's  breadth  out  of  the  community  of  work  into 
that  more  personal  and  particular  passion ? 

I  quaked  in  the  cold  blasts  which  blew  on  me  out 
of  unsuspected  doors  opening  on  my  life. 

And  still  I  went  back  to  Higgleston.  There 
seemed  nothing  else  to  do.  I  think  I  deceived  my 
self  with  the  notion  that  there  was  something  in 
Tommy's  resistance  to  a  more  acceptable  destiny, 
that  could  be  resolved  and  dissipated  by  the  proper 
stimulus.  But  I  knew,  in  fact,  that  he  and  Higgle 
ston  suited  one  another  admirably.  To  my  husband, 
that  he  should  keep  a  clothing  store  in  a  town  of 

215 


216  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

five  thousand  inhabitants  was  part  of  the  great 
natural  causation.  The  single  change  to  which  our 
condition  was  liable  was  that  the  business  might 
take  a  turn  which  would  enable  us  to  move  out  of  the 
store  into  a  house  of  our  own.  It  had  not  occurred  to 
Tommy  to  take  a  turn  himself.  The  Men's  Tailors 
and  Outfitters  lay  like  most  business  in  Higgleston, 
in  the  back  water,  rocking  at  times  in  the  wake  of  the 
world  traffic,  but  never  moving  with  it.  There  was  a 
vague  notion  of  progress  abroad  which  resulted  in 
our  going  through  the  motions  of  the  main  current. 
The  Live  Business  Men  organized  a  Board  of  Trade 
and  rented  a  room  to  hold  meetings  in,  but  I  do  not 
remember  that  when  they  had  met,  anything  came  of 
it.  The  great  tides  of  trade  went  about  the  world 
and  our  little  fleet  rocked  up  and  down.  If  I  had 
ever  had  any  hope  that  Tommy  and  I  might  out  of 
our  common  stock,  somehow  hoist  sail  and  make  a 
way  out  of  it,  in  that  spring  and  summer  I  completely 
lost  it. 

I  believe  Tommy  thought  we  were  perfectly 
happy.  Considering  how  things  turned  out,  I  am 
glad  to  have  it  so;  but  the  fact  is,  there  was  not  be 
tween  us  so  much  as  a  common  taste  in  furniture. 
In  the  five  years  of  married  life,  our  home  had  filled 
up  with  articles  which  by  colour  and  line  and  un- 
fitness  jarred  on  every  sense.  Tommy  had  what  he 
was  pleased  to  call  an  ear  for  music,  and  if  the  war 
ring  discords  of  our  furnishings  could  have  been 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  217 

translated  into  sound  he  would  have  gone  distracted 
with  it;  being  as  it  was  he  bought  me  a  fire  screen 
for  my  birthday.  Miss  Rathbone  hand-painted  it 
for  the  Baptist  bazaar,  and  Tommy  had  bought  it  at 
three  times  what  we  could  have  afforded  for  a  suitable 
ornament.  It  was  his  notion  of  our  relations  that 
we  and  the  Rathbones  should  do  things  like  that  by 
one  another.  I  suppose  you  can  find  the  like  of 
that  fire  screen  at  some  county  fair  still  in  Ohianna, 
but  you  will  find  nothing  more  atrocious.  Tommy 
liked  to  have  it  sitting  well  out  in  the  room  where  he 
could  admire  it.  He  would  remark  upon  it  sometimes 
with  complacency,  evenings  after  the  store  was  shut 
up,  before  he  sat  down  in  his  old  coat  and  slippers  to 
read  the  paper.  Occasionally  I  read  to  him  out  of  a 
magazine  or  a  play  I  had  picked  up,  in  the  intervals 
of  which  I  used  to  catch  him  furtively  keeping  up 
with  his  newspaper  out  of  the  tail  of  his  eye. 

Now  and  then  we  went  out  to  a  sociable  or  to 
the  Rathbones  for  supper.  Less  frequently  we  had 
them  to  a  meal  with  us.  It  was  characteristic  of 
business  partnerships  in  Higgleston  that  they  in 
volved  you  in  obligations  of  chicken  salad  and 
banana  cake  and  the  best  tablecloth.  Tommy  en 
joyed  these  occasions,  and  if  he  had  allowed  himself 
to  criticise  me  at  all,  it  would  have  been  for  my  inep 
titude  at  the  happy  social  usage.  Things  went  on 
so  with  us  month  after  month. 

And  if  you  ask  me  why  I  didn't  take  the  chance 


218  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

life  offers  to  women  to  justify  themselves  to  the  race, 
I  will  say  that  though  the  hope  of  a  child  presents 
itself  sentimentally  as  opportunity,  it  figures  pri 
marily  in  the  calculation  of  the  majority,  as  a  ques 
tion  of  expense.  The  hard  times  foreseen  by  Bur 
ton  Brothers  hung  black-winged  in  the  air.  We  had 
not,  in  fact,  been  able  to  do  more  than  keep  up  the 
interest  on  what  was  still  due  on  the  stock  and  fix 
tures.  Nor  had  I  even  quite  recovered  the  bodily 
equilibrium  disturbed  by  my  first  encounter  with 
the  rending  powers  of  life.  There  was  a  time  when 
the  spring  came  on  in  a  fulness,  when  the  procreant 
impulse  stirred  awake.  I  saw  myself  adequately  em 
ployed  shaping  men  for  it  ...  maybe  .  .  . 
but  the  immediate  deterring  fact  was  the  payment 
to  be  made  in  August. 

I  went  on  living  in  Higgleston  where  human  inter 
course  was  organized  on  the  belief,  that  whatever  a 
woman  has  of  intelligence  and  worth,  over  and  above 
the  sum  of  such  capacity  in  man,  is  to  be  excised  as  a 
superfluous  growth,  a  monstrosity.  Does  anybody 
remember  what  the  woman's  world  was  like  in  small 
towns  before  the  days  of  woman's  clubs?  There  was 
a  world  of  cooking  and  making  over;  there  was  a 
world  of  church-going  and  missionary  societies  and 
ministerial  cooperation,  half  grudged  and  half  as 
sumed  as  a  virtue  which,  since  it  was  the  only  thing 
that  lay  outside  themselves,  was  not  without  exten 
uation.  And  there  was  another  world  which  under- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  219 

lay  all  this,  coloured  and  occasioned  it,  sicklied  over 
with  futility;  it  was  a  world  all  of  the  care  and  ex 
pectancy  of  children  overshadowed  by  the  recurrent 
monthly  dread,  crept  about  by  whispers,  heretical 
but  persistent,  of  methods  of  circumventing  it,  of  a 
secret  practice  of  things  openly  condemned.  It  was 
a  world  that  went  half  the  time  in  faint-hearted  or 
unwilling  or  rebellious  anticipation,  and  half  on 
the  broken  springs  of  what,  as  the  subject  of  end 
less,  objectionable  discussions,  went  by  the  name  of 
""female  complaints." 

In  all  this  there  was  no  room  for  Olivia.  Some 
how  the  ordering  of  our  four  rooms  over  the  store 
didn't  appeal  to  me  as  a  justification  of  existence, 
and  I  didn't  care  to  undertake  again  matching  the 
adventures  of  my  neighbours  in  the  field  of  domestic 
economy  with  mine  in  the  department  of  self-ex 
pression.  Let  any  one  who  disbelieves  it  try  if  he 
can  secure  the  acceptance  of  his  art  on  its  merit  as 
work,  free  of  the  implication  of  egotism.  You  may 
talk  about  a  new  frosting  for  cake,  or  an  aeroplane 
you  have  invented,  but  you  must  not  speak  of  a  new 
verse  form  or  a  plastic  effect. 

All  this  time,  in  spite  of  my  recent  revulsion  from 
it,  I  was  consumed  with  the  desire  of  acting.  My 
new-found  faculty  ached  for  use.  It  woke  me  in  the 
night  and  wasted  me;  I  had  wild  thoughts  such  as 
men  have  in  the  grip  of  an  unjustifiable  passion. 
All  my  imaginings  at  that  time  were  of  events,  un- 


220  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

toward,  fantastic,  which  should  somehow  throw  me 
back  upon  the  stage,  without  the  necessity  on  my 
part  of  a  moral  conclusion.  Sarah  Croyden,  to 
whom  I  wrote  voluminously,  could  not  understand 
why  I  resisted  it;  there  was  after  all  no  actual  op 
position  except  what  lay  inherent  in  my  traditions. 
Sarah  had  such  a  way  of  accepting  life;  she  used  it 
and  her  gift.  Mine  used  me.  I  saw  that  it  might 
even  abuse  me.  She  went,  by  nature,  undefended 
and  unharmed  from  the  two-edged  sword  that  keeps 
the  gates  of  Creative  Art,  but  me  it  pierced  even  to 
the  dividing  of  soul  and  spirit.  My  husband  stood 
always  curiously  outside  the  consideration.  I  think 
he  was  scarcely  aware  of  what  went  on  in  me;  if 
any  news  of  my  tormented  state  reached  him,  he 
would  have  seen,  except  as  it  was  mollified  by  affec 
tion,  what  all  Higgleston  saw  in  it,  the  restlessness 
of  vanity,  a  craving  for  excitement,  for  praise,  and  a 
vague  taint  of  irregularity.  He  was  sympathetic  to 
the  point  of  admitting  that  Higgleston  was  dull;  he 
thought  we  might  join  the  Chatauqua  Society. 

"Or  you  might  get  up  a  class,"  he  suggested  hope 
fully;  "it  would  give  you  something  to  think  about." 

"Teach,"  I  cried;  "TEACH!  when  I'm  just  aching 
to  learn!" 

"Well,  then,"  he  achieved  a  triumph  of  reason 
ableness,  "if  you  don't  know  enough  to  teach  in 
Higgleston,  how  are  you  going  to  succeed  on  the 
stage?" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

It  was  not  Tommy,  however,  but  a  much  worse 
man  who  made  up  my  mind  for  me.  He  had 
been  brought  out  from  Chicago  during  my  absence, 
to  set  up  in  Higgleston's  one  department  store,  that 
factitious  air  of  things  being  done,  which  passed  for 
the  evidence  of  modernity.  He  had,  in  the  set  of  his 
clothes,  the  way  he  made  the  most  of  his  hair  and  the 
least  of  the  puffiness  about  his  eyes,  the  effect  of 
having  done  something  successfully  for  himself,  which 
I  believe  was  the  utmost  recommendation  he  had  for 
the  place.  He  preferred  himself  to  my  favour  on 
the  strength  of  having  seen  more  than  a  little  of  the 
theatre.  Very  soon  after  my  return,  he  took  to  drop 
ping  into  my  husband's  store  which,  in  view  of  its 
being  patronized  by  men  who  were  chiefly  otherwise 
occupied  during  the  day,  was  kept  open  rather  late 
in  the  evenings.  From  sheer  loneliness  I  had  fallen 
into  the  habit  of  going  down  after  supper  to  wait  on 
a  stray  customer  while  Tommy  made  up  the  books. 
Mr.  Montague,  who  went  familiarly  about  town  by 
the  name  of  Monty,  would  come  in  then  and  loll 
across  the  counter  chatting  to  me,  while  Tommy  sat 
at  his  desk  with  a  green  shade  over  his  eyes,  and  Mr. 
Rathbone,  who  never  came  more  than  a  step  or  two 
out  of  his  character  as  working  tailor,  clattered 
about  with  his  irons  in  the  back,  half  screened  by  the 
racks  of  custom  made  "Nobby  suits,  $9.98,"  which 
made  up  most  of  our  stock  in  trade. 

I  had  already,  without  paying  much  attention  to 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

it,  become  accustomed  to  the  shifting  of  men's  interest 
in  me  the  moment  my  connection  with  the  stage  be 
came  known:  a  certain  speculation  in  the  eye,  a 
freshening  of  the  wind  in  the  neighbourhood  of 
adventure;  but  by  degrees  it  began  to  work  through 
my  preoccupations  that  Mr.  Montague's  attention 
had  the  quality  of  settled  expectation,  the  sug 
gestion  of  a  relation  apart  from  the  casual  social 
contact,  which  he  wanted  but  an  opportunity  to  ful 
fill.  It  took  the  form  very  early,  when  Tommy 
would  look  up  from  his  entries  and  balances  to  make 
his  cheerful  contribution  to  the  conversation,  of  an 
attempt  to  include  me  in  a  covert  irritation  at  the 
interruption.  If  by  any  chance  he  found  me  alone, 
his  response  to  the  potential  impropriety  of  the  oc 
casion  awoke  in  me  the  plain  vulgar  desire  to  box 
his  ears.  But  no  experience  so  far  served  to  reveal 
the  whole  offensiveness  of  the  man's  assurance. 

The  week  that  Tommy  went  up  to  Chicago  to  do 
his  summer  buying,  we  made  a  practice  of  closing 
rather  early  in  the  long,  enervating  evenings,  since 
hardly  any  customer  could  have  been  inveigled  into 
the  store  on  any  account.  I  found  it  particularly 
irritating  then,  to  have  Mr.  Montague  leaning  across 
the  counter  to  me  with  a  manner  that  would  have 
caused  the  dogs  in  the  street  to  suspect  him  of  in 
trigue.  The  second  or  third  time  this  happened  I 
made  a  point  of  slipping  around  to  Mr.Rathbone  with 
the  suggestion  that  if  he  would  shut  up  and  go  home  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  223 

would  take  the  books  upstairs  with  me  and  attend 
them. 

I  was  indifferent  whether  or  not  Mr.  Montague 
should  hear  me,  but  I  judged  he  had  not,  for  far 
from  accepting  it  as  a  hint  that  I  wished  to  get  rid  of 
him,  that  air  he  had  of  covert  understanding  ap 
peared  to  have  increased  in  him  like  a  fever.  He 
made  no  attempt  to  resume  the  conversation,  but 
stood  tapping  his  boot  with  a  small  cane  he  affected, 
a  flush  high  up  under  the  puffy  eyes,  the  corners  of 
his  mouth  loosened,  every  aspect  of  the  man  fairly 
bristling  with  an  objectionable  maleness.  I  made 
believe  to  be  busy  putting  stock  in  order,  and  in  a 
minute  more  I  could  hear  old  Rathbone  come  putter 
ing  out  of  his  corner  to  draw  the  dust  cloths  over  the 
racks  of  ready-made  suits  and,  after  what  seemed  an 
interminable  interval,  fumbling  at  the  knobs  of  the 
safe. 

"Oh,"  I  snatched  at  the  opportunity,  "I  changed 
the  combination;  let  me  show  you."  I  was  around 
beside  him  in  a  twinkling. 

"Good-night,"  I  called  to  Montague  over  my 
shoulder. 

"Good-night,"  he  said;  the  tone  was  charged. 
The  fumbling  of  the  locks  covered  the  sound  of  his  de 
parture.  I  got  Mr.  Rathbone  out  at  the  door  at  last, 
and  locked  it  behind  him.  I  turned  back  to  lower 
the  flame  of  the  acetylene  lamp  and  in  the  receding 
flare  of  it  between  the  shrouded  racks  I  came  face 


224  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

to  face  with  Mr.  Montague.  He  stood  at  the  outer 
ring  of  the  light  and  in  the  shock  of  amazement  I 
gave  the  last  turn  of  the  button  which  left  us  in  a 
sudden  blinding  dark.  I  felt  him  come  toward  me 
by  the  sharp  irradiation  of  offensiveness. 

"Oh,  you  clever  little  joker,  you!"  The  tone  was 
fatuous. 

I  dodged  by  instinct  and  felt  for  the  button  again 
to  throw  on  the  flood  of  light;  it  caught  him 
standing  square  in  the  middle  of  the  aisle  in  plain 
sight  from  the  street;  almost  unconsciously  he  al 
tered  his  attitude  to  one  less  betraying,  but  the  re 
sponse  of  his  mind  to  mine  was  not  so  rapid. 

"I'm  going  to  shut  up  the  store,"  I  was  very 
quiet  about  it.  "You'll  oblige  me  by  going " 

"Oh,  come  now;  what's  the  use?  I  thought  you 
were  a  woman  of  the  world." 

I  got  behind  the  counter,  past  him  toward  the 
door. 

"You  an  actress  .  .  .  you  don't  mean  to  say !  By 
Jove,  I'm  not  going  to  be  made  a  fool  of  after  such 
an  encouragement!  I'm  not  going  without " 

"Mr.  Montague,"  I  said,  "Tillie  Hemingway  is 
coming  to  stay  with  me  nights;  she  will  be  here  in  a 
few  minutes;  you'd  better  not  let  her  find  you  here." 
I  unbarred  the  door  and  threw  it  wide  open. 

"Oh,  come  now "     He  struggled  for*  some 

footing  other  than  defeat.     "Of  course,  if  you  can't 
meet  me  like  a  woman  of  the  world you're  a  nice 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS"  225 

actress,  you  are!"  I  looked  at  him;  the  steps  and 
voices  of  passersby  sounded  on  the  pavement;  he 
went  out  with  his  tail  between  his  legs.  I  locked 
the  door  after  him  and  double  locked  it. 

I  climbed  up  to  my  room  and  locked  myself  in 
that.  The  boiling  of  my  blood  made  such  a  noise  in 
my  ears  that  I  could  not  hear  Tillie  Hemingway  when 
she  came  knocking,  and  the  poor  girl  went  away  in 
tears.  After  a  long  time  I  got  to  bed  and  sat  there 
with  my  arms  about  my  knees.  I  did  not  feel  safe 
there;  I  knew  I  should  never  be  safe  again  except  in 
that  little  square  of  the  world  upon  which  the  foot 
lights  shone,  from  which  the  tightening  of  the  reins  of 
the  audience  in  my  hands  should  justify  my  life  to 
me.  I  was  sick  with  longing  for  it,  aching  like  a 
woman  abandoned  for  the  arms  of  her  beloved.  I  fled 
toward  it  with  all  my  thought  from  illicit  solicitation, 
and  it  was  not  the  husband  of  my  body  I  thought  of 
in  that  connection,  but  the  choice  of  my  soul. 

People  wonder  why  sensitive,  self-respecting 
women  are  not  driven  away  from  the  stage  by  the 
offences  that  hedge  it;  they  are  driven  deeper  and 
farther  into  its  enfoldment.  There  is  nothing  to 
whiten  the  burning  of  its  shames  but  the  high  white 
ness  of  its  ultimate  perfection.  It  is  so  with  all  art,  not 
back  in  the  press  of  life,  but  forward  on  some  over 
topping  headland,  one  loses  behind  the  yelping  pack 
and  eases  the  sting  of  resentment.  I  did  not  agree 
in  the  beginning  to  make  you  understand  this.  I 


226  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

only  tell  you  that  it  is  so.  All  that  night  I  sat  with 
my  head  upon  my  knees  and  considered  how  I  might 
win  back  to  it. 

I  tried,  when  my  husband  came  home,  to  put  the 
incident  to  him  in  a  way  that  would  stand  for  my 
new-found  determination.  I  did  not  get  so  far  with 
it.  I  saw  him  shrink  from  the  mere  recital  with  a 
man's  timorousness. 

"Oh,  come  —  he  couldn't  have  meant  so  bad  as 
that."  His  male  dread  of  a  "situation"  plead  with 
me  not  to  insist  upon  it.  "And  he  went  just  as  soon 
as  you  told  him  to.  Of  course  if  he  had  tried  to 
force  you  .  .  .  but  you  say  yourself  he  went  quietly." 

He  was  seeing  and  shrinking  from  what  Higgleston 
would  get  out  of  the  incident  in  the  way  of  vulgar 
entertainment  if  I  insisted  on  his  taking  it  up;  by  the 
code  there,  I  shouldn't  have  been  subject  to  such  if 
I  hadn't  invited  it. 

"Of  course,"  he  enforced  himself,  "y°u  did  right  to 
turn  him  down,  but  I  don't  believe  he'll  try  it  again." 

"He  won't  have  a  chance.  I'm  going  back  on  the 
stage  so  soon;"  the  implication  of  my  tone  must  have 
got  through  even  Tommy's  unimaginativeness;  he 
said  the  only  bitter  thing  that  I  ever  heard  from  him. 

"Well,  if  you  hadn't  gone  on  the  stage  in  the  first 
place  it  probably  wouldn't  have  happened." 

He  came  round  to  the  situation  in  another  frame 
when  he  learned  that  I  had  written  to  Sarah  putting 
matters  in  train  for  an  engagement. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  227 

"You  will  probably  be  away  all  winter,"  he  said. 
"It  seems  to  me,  Olivia,  that  you  don't  take  any 
account  of  the  fact  that  I  am  fond  of  you."  We  were 
sitting  on  a  little  shelf  of  a  back  balcony  we  had,  for 
the  sake  of  coolness,  and  I  went  and  sat  on  his  knee. 

"I'm  fond  of  you,  Tommy,  ever  so.  But  I  can't 
stand  the  life  here;  it  smothers  me.  And  we  don't 
do  anything;  we  don't  get  anywhere." 

"I  don't  know  what  you  mean,  Olivia;  we're 
building  up  quite  a  business;  we'll  be  able  to  make 
a  payment  this  year,  and  as  the  town  improves " 

"Oh,  Tommy,  come  away;  come  away  into  the 
world  with  me.  Let  us  go  out  and  do  things;  let 
us  be  part  of  things." 

"  Higgleston's  good  enough  for  me.  We're 
building  up  trade,  and  everybody  says  the  town  is 
sure  to  go  ahead " 

"Oh,  Tommy,  Tommy,  what  do  I  care  about  a 
business  here  if  we  lose  the  whole  world  —  and  we'll 
be  old  and  gray  before  we  get  the  business  paid  for.' 
Oh,  it  isn't  because  I  don't  care  about  you,  Tommy, 
because  I  am  not  satisfied  with  you;  it  is  the  glory 
of  the  world  I  want,  and  the  wonder  of  Art,  and  great 
deeds  going  up  and  down  in  it!  I  want  us  to  have 
that,  Tommy;  to  have  it  together  .  .  .  you  and  I,  and 
not  another.  It's  all  there  in  the  world,  Tommy,  all 
the  colour  and  the  splendour  .  .  .  great  love  and  great 
work  ...  let  us  go  out  and  take  it;  let  us  go  .  .  .  . " 
I  had  slipped  down  from  his  knees  to  my  own  as  I 


228  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

talked,  pleading  with  him,  and  I  saw,  by  the  light 
of  the  lamp  from  within,  his  face,  charged  with 
pained  bewilderment,  settle  into  lines  of  habitual 
resistance  to  the  unknown,  the  unknowable.  My 
voice  trailed  out  into  sobbing. 

"Of  course,  Olivia,  I  don't  want  to  keep  you  if 
you  are  not  happy  here,  but  I  have  to  stay  myself." 
His  voice  was  broken  but  determined,  with  the  de 
termination  of  a  little  man  not  seeing  far  ahead  of 
him.  "I  have  to  keep  the  business  together." 

I  went,  as  it  was  foredoomed  I  should,  about  the 
middle  of  September.  Sarah  and  I  had  been  so 
fortunate  as  to  get  engagements  together.  My 
going,  upheaving  as  it  had  been  in  respect  to  my  own 
adjustments,  made  hardly  a  ripple  in  the  life  around 
me.  Even  Miss  Rathbone  failed  to  rise  to  her  for 
mer  heights,  but  was  obliged  to  piece  out  her  in 
terest  with  her  customary  dressmaker's  manner  of 
having  temporarily  overlaid  her  absorption  in  your 
affair  with  an  unwilling  distraction. 

The  rest  of  Higgleston  received  the  announcement 
with  the  air  of  not  supposing  it  to  be  any  of  their 
business,  but  that  in  any  case  they  couldn't  approve 
of  it.  Mrs.  Harvey  put  a  common  feminine  view  of 
it  very  aptly. 

"I  shouldn't  think,"  she  said,  "your  husband 
would  let  you."  It  was  not  a  view  that  was  likely 
to  have  a  deterrent  effect  upon  me. 


CHAPTER  IX 

WE  HAD  the  good  fortune  that  year,  Sarah  and  I,  to 
be  with  a  manager  who  redeemed  many  OTarrells. 
The  Hardings  —  for  his  wife,  under  her  stage  name 
of  Estelle  Manning,  played  with  him  and  was  the 
better  half  of  all  his  counsels  —  were  of  the  sort  of 
actor-managers  to  whom,  if  the  American  stage  ever 
arrives  at  anything  commensurate  with  its  oppor 
tunity,  it  will  owe  much.  They  were  not  either  of 
them  of  the  stripe  of  genius,  but  up  to  the  limit  of 
their  endowment,  sound,  sincere  and  able  to  inter 
pret  life  to  the  people  through  the  virtue  of  being 
so  humanly  of  the  people  themselves.  It  was  very 
good  for  me  to  be  with  them,  not  only  for  the  stage 
craft  they  taught  me,  but  for  the  healing  of  my  mind 
against  the  contagion  of  irresponsibility.  The  Hard- 
ings  taught  me  my  way  about  the  professional  world, 
the  management  of  my  gift,  its  market  value,  but  I 
am  not  sure  I  do  not  owe  much  more  to  the  fact  that 
they  loved  one  another  quite  simply  and  devotedly, 
and  to  the  certainty  which  they  seemed  to  make  for 
us  all  that  loyalty,  truth,  and  forbearance  were  part 
of  the  natural  order  of  things. 

I  was  aware,  when  I  was  with  the  Shamrocks,  of  a 
subconscious  current  against  which  any  mention  of 

229 


230  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

my  husband  appeared  a  kind  of  gaucherie;  it  was 
wholesome  for  me  then,  to  find  it  expected  of  me  by 
the  Hardings  that  I  should  act  better  after  I  had 
received  a  long,  affectionate  letter  from  Tommy,  and 
to  be  able  to  refer  to  it  quite  unaffectedly.  Every 
body  in  the  company  took  the  greatest  interest  in  his 
coming  on  at  Christmas  to  spend  four  days  with  me. 

We  had  a  carefully  chosen  company,  and  clean, 
straightforward  plays  which  met  with  gratifying 
success.  At  the  end  of  February,  when  traffic  was 
tied  up  during  the  great  ice  storm,  I  was  near  enough 
to  get  home  to  Taylorville  and  spend  a  week  there. 

Tommy  came  to  meet  me  and  we  were  all  happy 
together,  mother  sitting  nearly  inarticulate  in  her 
chair,  pleased  as  a  child  to  see  me  doing  all  the  parts 
in  our  repertory,  and  Effie  reading  my  press  notices 
to  whoever  could  be  got  to  listen  to  them.  I  seemed 
to  have  found  the  groove  in  which  the  wheels  of  my 
life  went  round  smoothly;  I  was  justified  of  much 
that  in  my  girlhood  I  had  been  made  to  feel  so  sorely, 
set  me  reprehensibly  apart.  I  remember  Forester 
telling  how  he  had  heard  Charlie  Gowers  retailing 
the  incident  of  my  having  slapped  him  when  he 
tried  to  kiss  me,  getting  a  kind  of  reflected  glory  out 
of  the  incident  being  so  much  to  my  credit. 

I  went  back  to  Higgleston  in  May  and  was  hap 
pier  than  I  had  been  in  the  six  years  of  my  married 
life.  1  had  my  work  and  my  husband;  all  that  I 
wanted  now  was  to  bring  the  two  into  closer  re- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  231 

lation;  it  seemed  not  unlikely  of  accomplishment. 
With  what  I  had  saved  of  my  salary,  Tommy  was 
able  to  make  quite  a  payment  on  the  business,  and 
with  the  release  of  that  pressure  the  whole  grip  of 
Higgleston  seemed  to  be  loosed  from  him.  When 
I  suggested  that  I  might  get  permanent  engagements 
in  Chicago  or  St.  Louis,  where  he  could  establish 
himself,  he  was  disposed  to  view  it  as  not  unthink 
able  in  connection  with  what  might  be  expected  from 
a  live  business  man. 

I  had  to  leave  home  early  in  the  autumn  for  re 
hearsals,  and  to  leave  Tommy,  by  some  chance  of 
the  weather  a  trifle  under  it.  I  felt  I  shouldn't 
have  been  able  to  do  so  if  my  husband  and  Miss 
Rathbone  hadn't  been  eminently  on  those  terms 
that  fulfilled  Tommy's  ideal  in  respect  to  the  women 
folk  of  his  partner.  Very  likely,  as  she  maintained, 
it  was  a  feeling  of  caste  that  rendered  her  professional 
affectionateness  offensive  to  me.  One  had  to  admit 
that  when  she  applied  it  to  her  shuffling,  peering  old 
father,  with  red-lidded  eyes  and  a  nose  that  occa 
sionally  wanted  wiping,  it  was  every  way  commend 
able.  At  any  rate  I  was  glad  on  this  occasion  to 
take  what  she  did  for  old  Rathbone  as  an  assurance 
that  if  Tommy  fell  ill,  or  anything  untoward,  he 
wouldn't  lack  for  anything  a  woman  might  do  for 
him. 

That  winter  Mr.  Harding  starred  me,  and  what  a 
wonderful  winter  it  was!  Sarah  says,  taking  ao- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

count  of  the  cold  and  the  condition  of  the  roads,  it 
was  rather  a  hard  one,  but  I  was  floated  clear  of  all 
such  considerations  on  the  crest  of  success.  Noth 
ing  whatever  seemed  to  have  gone  wrong  with  it  ex 
cept  that  Tommy  failed  me  at  Christmas.  He  was 
to  have  spent  a  week,  but  wired  me  at  the  last  mo 
ment  that  he  could  not  leave  before  Wednesday,  and 
then  when  he  came  stayed  only  until  Saturday.  He 
had  something  to  say  about  the  pressure  of  the  holi 
day  trade  in  neckties  and  cuff  links  such  as  the  ladies 
of  Higgleston  habitually  invested  in,  on  behalf  of 
their  masculine  members,  and  all  the  time  he  was 
with  me,  wore  that  efflorescence  of  appreciation 
which  I  have  long  since  learned  to  recognize  as  the 
overt  sign  of  male  delinquency. 

If  I  thought  of  it  at  all  in  that  connection,  it  was 
clean  swept  out  of  my  mind  by  meeting  early  in 
January  with  Mr.  Eversley  and  hearing  him  first 
apply  to  myself  that  phrase  which  I  have  chosen  for 
the  title  to  this  writing.  Mark  Eversley,  the  great 
est  modern  actor!  So  we  all  believed.  He  had 
been  an  old  friend  of  Mr.  Harding's;  they  had  had 
their  young  struggles  together;  we  crowded  around 
our  manager  to  hear  him  tell  of  them;  struggles 
which,  in  so  far  as  they  identified  themselves  with 
our  own,  seemed  to  bring  us  by  implication  within 
reach  of  his  present  fame.  Eversley  played  in  St. 
Louis  while  we  were  there,  and  having  an  evening 
to  spare,  in  spite  of  all  the  eager  social  appeal,  chose 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  233 

to  spend  it  with  the  Hardings.  They  had  had  dinner 
together,  and  as  Mr.  Harding  did  not  come  on  until 
the  second  act,  the  great  tragedian  sat  with  him  in 
his  dressing  room,  visiting  together  between  the  cues 
like  two  boys  in  a  dormitory.  That  was  how  Evers- 
ley  happened  to  be  standing  in  the  wings  in  my  great 
third  act,  and  as  I  came  out  between  gusts  of  applause 
after  it,  he  was  very  kind  to  me. 

"You  will  go  far,  little  lady,"  said  he,  his  lean  face 
alive  with  kindliness,  "you  will  go  farther  and  have 
to  come  back  and  pick  up  some  dropped  stitches, 
but  in  the  end  you  will  get  where  you  are  bound." 
It  was  not  for  me  to  tell  him  how  the  mere  conscious 
ness  of  his  presence  had  carried  me  that  night  to  the 
utmost  pitch  of  my  capacity;  I  stood  and  blushed 
with  confusion  while  he  fumbled  for  his  card. 

"I  will  hear  of  you  again,"  he  said;  "I  am  bound 
to  hear  of  you;  in  the  meantime  here  is  my  per 
manent  address.  It  may  be  that  I  can  be  of  use  to 
you  when  you  come  to  the  bad  places." 

"Oh,"  said  Mrs.  Harding,  whose  failure  to  win  any 
conspicuous  distinction  for  herself  had  not  embit 
tered  her,  "she  seems  to  have  cleared  most  of  the 
hard  places  at  a  bound." 

"My  dear  young  lady,"  Eversley  appealed  to  me 
with  a  charming  whimsicality,  "whatever  you  do, 
don't  let  them  put  that  into  your  head;  you  will  in 
deed  need  me  if  you  get  to  thinking  that.  You  are, 
I  suspect,  a  woman  of  genius,  and  in  that  case  there 


234  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

will  always  be  bad  places  ahead  of  you  —  you  are 
doomed,  you  are  driven;  they  will  never  let  up  on 
you." 

Well,  he  should  know;  he  was  a  man  of  genius. 
I  hope  it  might  be  true  about  me,  but  I  was  afraid. 
For  to  be  a  genius  is  no  such  vanity  as  you  imagine. 
It  is  to  know  great  desires  and  to  have  no  will  of  your 
own  toward  fulfilment;  it  is  to  feed  others,  yourself 
unfed;  it  is  to  be  broken  and  plied  as  the  Powers 
determine;  it  is  to  serve,  and  to  serve,  and  to  get 
nothing  out  of  it  beyond  the  joy  of  serving.  And  to 
know  if  you  have  done  that  acceptably  you  have  to 
depend  on  the  plaudits  of  the  crowd;  the  Powers  give 
no  sign;  many  have  died  not  knowing. 

There  is  no  more  vanity  in  calling  yourself  a 
woman  of  genius  if  you  know  what  genius  means,  than 
might  be  imputed  to  one  of  the  guinea  pigs  set 
aside  for  experimentation  in  a  laboratory;  but  the 
guinea  pigs  who  run  free  in  the  garden  impute  it  to 
us.  I  wrote  my  mother  and  Tommy  what  Eversley 
had  said,  but  I  knew  they  would  see  nothing  more 
in  it  than  that  he  had  paid  me  a  compliment  which 
it  would  not  be  modest  to  make  much  of  in  public. 

The  successes  of  that  year  prolonged  the  season 
by  a  month,  and  by  the  time  I  got  home  to  Higgle- 
ston  the  leaves  were  all  out  on  the  maples  and  the 
wide  old  yards  smelled  of  syringa.  I  came  back  to  it 
full  of  the  love  of  the  world,  alive  in  every  fibre  of  my 
being,  and  the  first  thing  I  noticed  was  that  it  caused 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  235 

my  husband  some  embarrassment.  There  was  a 
shyness  in  his  resumption  of  our  relations  more  than 
could  be  accounted  for  by  the  native  Taylorvillian 
gaucheries  of  emotion. 

"My  dear,"  I  protested,  "you  don't  seem  a  bit 
glad  to  see  me." 

"You  are  away  so  much,"  he  excused.  "You're 
getting  to  seem  almost  a  stranger." 

"Getting?  I  should  say  I  am.  This  morning  it 
seemed  to  me  almost  as  if  I  waked  up  in  another 
woman's  house."  I  meant  no  more  than  to  suggest 
how  little  the  walls  of  it,  the  furniture,  the  draperies, 
expressed  my  new  mood  of  creative  power,  but  sud 
denly  I  saw  my  husband  colour  a  deep,  embarrassed 
red. 

"You  never  did  take  any  interest  in  our  life  here 
...  in  the  business  ...  in  me."  He  seemed  to 
be  making  out  a  case  against  me. 

"Don't  say  in  you,  Tommy;  but  the  life  here,  yes; 
there  is  so  little  to  it.  Another  year  and  Mr.  Hard 
ing  says  I  could  hope  to  stay  in  Chicago."  My  hus 
band  pushed  away  his  plate;  we  were  at  breakfast 
the  second  morning. 

"Higgleston's  good  enough  for  me,"  he  protested. 
He  got  up  and  stood  at  the  window  with  his  back  to 
me,  looking  out  at  the  side  street  and  the  tardy  traf 
fic  of  the  town  beginning  to  stir  in  it.  "When  you 
hate  it  so,"  he  said,  "I  wonder  you  come  back  to 
it."  But  my  mood  was  proof  against  even  this. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Oh,  Thomas,  Thomas!"  I  got  my  hands  about 
his  arm  and  snuggled  my  head  against  it.  "And  you 
can't  even  guess  why  I  come  back?"  He  looked  at 
me,  vaguely  troubled  by  the  caress,  but  not  respond 
ing  to  it. 

"Do  you  care  so  much?" 

"Ever  and  ever  so."  I  thought  he  was  in  need 
of  reassurance. 

I  hardly  know  when  I  began  to  get  an  inkling  of 
what  was  wrong  with  him;  it  trickled  coldly  to  me 
from  dropped  words,  inflections,  sidelong  glances. 
Whenever  I  went  out  I  was  aware  of  all  Higgleston 
watching,  watching  like  a  cat  at  a  mouse-hole  for 
something  to  come  out.  What?  Reports  of  my 
success  had  reached  them  through  the  papers. 
Were  they  looking  for  some  endemic  impropriety 
to  break  out  on  me  as  a  witness  to  what  a  popular 
actress  must  inevitably  become?  By  degrees  it 
worked  through  to  me  that  all  Higgleston  knew  things 
about  my  situation  that  were  held  from  me.  What 
they  expected  to  see  come  out  in  my  behaviour  was 
the  stripe  of  chastisement. 

When  I  had  been  at  home  four  or  five  days  it  oc 
curred  to  me  Miss  Rathbone  had  not  yet  run  in  to 
see  me  with  that  quasi-familiarity  which  had  grown 
out  of  the  business  association  of  our  men.  Old 
Rathbone  had  said  that  she  had  the  trousseau  of 
one  of  the  Harvey  girls  in  hand,  but  I  knew  that  if 
the  courtesy  had  been  due  from  me,  I  couldn't  have 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  237 

neglected  it  without  the  risk  of  being  thought  what 
Miss  Rathbone  herself  would  have  called  uppish. 
So  the  very  next  afternoon,  having  fallen  in  with 
some  Higgleston  ladies  strolling  the  long  street  that 
led  through  the  town  from  countryside  to  country 
side,  passing  her  gate,  it  struck  me  that  here  was 
an  excellent  opportunity  to  run  in  and  exchange  a 
greeting  with  her.  I  said  as  much  to  Mrs.  Ross  and 
Mrs.  Harvey,  as  I  swung  the  picket  gate  out  across 
the  board  walk;  there  was  something  in  their  way  of 
standing  back  from  it  that  gave  them  the  air  of 
sheering  off  from  any  implication  in  the  incident. 
They  looked  at  the  sidewalk  and  their  lips  were  a 
little  drawn;  I  should  have  known  that  look  very 
well  by  that  time.  I  threw  out  against  it  just  that 
degree  of  impalpable  resistance  that  was  demanded 
by  my  official  relation  to  the  women  of  my  husband's 
business  partner,  and  clinched  it  with  the  click  of 
the  gate  swinging  to  behind  me,  but  as  I  went  up  the 
peony-bordered  walk  I  wondered  what  Miss  Rath- 
bone  would  possibly  have  done  to  get  herself  talked 
about. 

I  was  let  into  the  workroom  by  Tillie  Hemingway, 
in  the  character  of  a  baster,  with  her  mouth  full  of 
threads;  Miss  Rathbone  came  hurrying  from  a  fit 
ting,  and  in  the  brief  moment  of  crossing  my  half  of 
the  room  to  meet  her  I  was  aware  that  she  had  turned 
a  sickly  hue  of  fear.  She  must  have  seen  me  coming 
up  the  street  with  the  other  women,  I  surmised,  and 


238  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

guessed  that  I  knew.  I  felt  a  kind  of  compulsion  on 
me  to  assure  her  by  an  extra  graciousness  that  I  did 
not  know,  and  that  it  wouldn't  make  any  difference 
if  I  did.  She  was  not  changed  at  all  except  perhaps 
as  to  a  trifle  more  abundance  of  bosom  and  a  greater 
insensibility  to  the  pins  with  which  she  bristled. 
There  was  the  same  effect  of  modishness  in  the  blond 
coiffure  with  the  rats  showing,  and  the  well  cut,  half- 
hooked  gown,  but  she  seemed  to  know  so  little  what 
to  do  with  my  visit  that  I  was  glad  to  cut  it  short  and 
get  away  into  the  wide,  overflowing  day.  I  went 
on  under  the  maples  in  leafage  full  and  tender,  follow 
ing  the  faint  scent  of  the  first  cutting  of  the  meadows, 
quite  to  the  end  of  the  village  and  a  mile  or  two  into 
the  country  road,  feeling  the  working  of  the  Creative 
Powers  in  me,  much  as  it  seemed  the  sentient  earth 
must  feel  the  summer,  a  warm,  benignant  process. 
I  was  at  one  with  the  soul  of  things  and  knew  myself 
fruitful.  At  last  when  the  dust  of  the  roadway  dis 
turbed  by  the  homing  teams,  collected  in  layers  of  the 
cooler  air,  and  the  bats  were  beginning,  I  tore  myself 
away  from  the  fair  day  as  from  a  lover  and  went  back 
to  Tommy  waiting  patiently  for  his  supper.  While 
I  was  getting  it  on  the  table  I  recalled  Miss  Rath- 
bone. 

"What,"  I  said,  "has  she  been  doing  to  get  herself 
talked  about?"  Suddenly  there  whipped  out  on  his 
face  the  counterpart  of  the  flinching  which  I  had 
noted  in  the  dressmaker. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  239 

Who  said  she  had  been  talked  about?  What 
have  they  been  telling  you?  A  pack  of  lying  old 
cats!" 

"So  she  has  been  talked  about?"  I  put  down  a 
pile  of  plates  the  better  to  account  to  myself  for  his 
excitement. 

"I  might  have  known  somebody  would  get  at 
you.  Why  can't  they  come  to  me." 

"Tommy!  Has  Miss  Rathbone  been  talked 
about  with  you?  Oh,  my  dear!"  I  meant  it  for 
commiseration.  Tommy  went  sullen  all  at  once. 

"  I  don't  want  to  talk  about  it.  I  won't  talk  about 
it!" 

"You  needn't.  And  as  for  what  the  others  say, 
you  don't  suppose  I  am  going  to  believe  it?"  He 
turned  visibly  sick  at  the  assurance. 

"I'll  tell  you  about  it  after  supper,"  he  protested. 
"I  meant  to  tell  you."  I  kept  my  mind  turned  de 
liberately  away  from  the  subject  until  it  was  night 
and  I  heard  the  last  tardy  customer  depart,  then  the 
shutters  go  up,  and  after  a  considerable  interval  my 
husband's  foot  upon  the  stairs. 

I  hope  I  have  made  you  understand  how  good  he 
was,  with  what  simple  sort  of  goodness,  not  meant  to 
stand  the  strain  of  the  complexity  in  which  he  found 
himself.  He  wanted  desperately  to  get  out  of  it,  to 
get  in  touch  again  with  straight  and  simple  lines  of 
living.  As  he  stood  before  me  then  his  face  was 
streaked  red  and  white  with  the  stress  of  the  situa- 


240  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

tion,  like  a  man  after  a  great  bodily  exertion.  I  was 
moved  suddenly  to  spare  him  —  after  all  what  was 
the  village  dressmaker  to  us?  Tommy  flared  out  at 
me. 

"She  is  as  good  as  you  are  .  .  .  she's  as  pure  .  .  . 
as  kind-hearted.  It's  as  much  your  fault  as  anybody's. 
You  were  away;  you  were  always  away."  His  voice 
trailed  out  into  extenuation.  There  fell  a  long  pause 
in  which  several  things  became  clear  to  me. 

"Tell  me,"  I  said  at  last. 

Tommy  sat  down  on  the  red  plush  couch.  He  had 
taken  off  his  coat  downstairs,  for  the  evening  was 
warm.  There  was  pink  in  his  necktie  and  the  freck 
les  stood  out  across  his  nose.  I  was  taken  with  a 
wild  sense  of  the  ridiculous.  Miss  Rathbone,  I  knew, 
was  six  years  my  husband's  senior. 

"I  went  there  a  good  deal  last  winter,"  he  began. 
"I  never  meant  any  harm  .  .  .  my  business  partner 
...  it  was  lonesome  here.  Of  course  I  ought  to  have 
known  people  would  talk.  Nobody  told  me.  She 
was  brave,  she  bore  it  a  long  time,  and  then  I  saw 
that  something  was  the  matter.  I  didn't  know  until 
she  told  me,  how  fond  of  her  I  was " 

"Tommy,  Tommy!"  Strangely,  it  was  I  crying 
out.  "Fond  of  her?  Fond  of  her? " 

"I  was  fond  of  her,"  he  insisted  dully.  "She 
suffered  a  lot  on  account  of  me."  The  words 
dropped  to  me  through  immeasurable  cold  space.  I 
believe  there  were  more  explanations,  excusings.  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  241 

was  aware  of  being  wounded  in  some  far,  unreach- 
able  place.  I  sat  stunned  and  watched  the  widening 
rings  of  pain  and  amazement  spread  toward  me.  By 
and  by  tears  came;  I  cried  long  and  quietly.  I  got 
down  on  the  floor  at  my  husband's  knees  and  put  my 
arms  about  his  body,  crying.  After  a  time  I  re 
member  his  helping  me  to  undress  and  we  got  into 
bed.  We  had  but  the  one.  I  know  it  now  for  the 
sign  that  I  never  loved  my  husband  as  wives  should 
love,  that  I  felt  no  offence  in  this;  sex  jealousy  was 
not  awake  in  me.  We  lay  in  bed  with  our  arms 
around  one  another  and  cried  for  the  pain  and  be 
wilderment  of  what  had  happened  to  us. 


CHAPTER    X 

As  IF  the  attraction  Miss  Rathbone  had  for  my 
husband  had  been  a  spell,  the  mere  naming  of  which 
dissipated  it,  we  spent  the  ensuing  three  or  four  days 
in  the  glow  of  renewal.  It  was  Miss  Rathbone  her 
self  who  drew  us  out  of  that  excluding  intimacy;  set 
us  apart  where  we  could  feel  the  cold  stiffness  of  our 
hurts  and  the  injury  we  had  inflicted  each  on  the 
other. 

Whatever  there  had  been  between  them,  and  I 
never  knew  very  clearly  what,  they  had  failed  to 
reckon  on  the  recrudescence  of  the  interest  I  had 
always  had  for  my  husband,  and  the  tie  of  associa 
tion.  At  any  rate  Miss  Rathbone  failed.  I  must 
suppose  that  she  loved  Tommy,  that  she  was  hunger 
ing  for  the  sight  of  him,  needing  desperately  to  feel 
again  the  pressure  of  whatever  bond  had  been  be 
tween  them.  She  came  into  the  store  on  the  fourth 
evening  after  my  husband's  admission  of  it,  on  one 
of  the  excuses  she  could  so  easily  make  out  of  her 
father's  being  there.  I  was  sitting  upstairs  with 
some  sewing  when  she  came  and  neither  saw  nor 
heard  her,  but  the  unslumbering  instinct,  before  I 
was  half  aware  of  it,  had  drawn  me  to  the  head  of 
the  stair. 

242 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  243 

As  I  came  down  it,  still  in  the  shadow  of  the  upper1 
landing,  I  saw  her  leaning  across  the  counter  with1 
that  factious  air  of  modishness  which  was  so  large 
a  part  of  her  stock  in  trade  with  Higgleston.  She 
had  on  all  her  newest  things,  and  I  think  she  was 
rouged  a  little.  Even  with  the  width  of  the  counter 
between  them  she  had  the  effect  of  enveloping  my 
husband  with  that  manner  of  hers  as  with  a  net;  to 
set  up  in  him  the  illusion  of  all  that  I  was  in  fact; 
mystery,  passion,  the  air  of  the  great  world.  I  was 
pierced  through  with  the  realization  that  with  men 
it  is  not  so  much  being  that  counts,  as  seeming. 
There  was  a  touch  of  the  fatuous  in  the  way  Tom 
my  submitted  to  the  implication  of  her  attitude  as 
she  took  a  flower  from  her  breast  and  pinned  it  in 
his  coat.  The  foot  of  the  stair  came  almost  to  the 
end  of  the  counter  where  they  stood,  and  a  trick  of 
the  light  falling  from  the  hanging  lamp  threw  the 
upper  half  of  it  in  shadow.  I  stood  just  within 
it  with  my  hand  upon  the  rail.  Something  in  the 
avidity  of  yielding  in  my  husband's  manner  was 
like  a  call  in  me;  I  moved  involuntarily  a  step 
downward. 

They  heard  and  then  they  saw  me;  they  stopped 
frozen  in  their  places  and  the  thing  that  froze  them 
was  the  consciousness  of  guilt.  They  stood  con 
fessed  of  a  disloyalty.  I  turned  full  in  their  sight 
and  walked  back  up  the  stair.  It  was  very  late 
that  night  when  Tommy  came  up  to  me. 


244  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"If  that  is  going  on  in  the  house,"  I  notified  him, 
"you  can't  expect  me  to  stay." 

"I  dare  say  you'd  be  glad  of  a  chance  to  leave." 

"Is  that  why  you  are  offering  it  to  me?" 

It  was  by  such  degrees  we  covered  the  distance 
between  our  situation  and  the  open  question  of 
divorce.  But  there  were  lapses  of  tenderness  and 
turning  back  upon  the  trail. 

"I  don't  want  anybody  but  you,  Olivia,"  Tommy 
would  protest.  "If  you  would  only  stay  with  me!" 

"Oh,  Tommy,  if  you  would  only  come  away  with 
me!" 

If  either  of  these  things  had  been  possible  for  us,  I 
think  Tommy  would  have  recovered  from  his  in 
fatuation  and  been  the  happier  for  it.  Or  even  if 
Miss  Rathbone  had  kept  away  from  him.  But  that 
is  what  she  couldn't  or  wouldn't  do.  She  might 
have  thought  that  by  being  seen  coming  in  and  out 
of  the  store,  she  could  stave  off  criticism  by  the  ap 
pearance  of  being  on  good  terms  with  us.  At  any 
rate  she  came.  I  think  her  coming  caused  my  hus 
band  some  embarrassment,  and,  manlike,  he  made 
her  pay  for  it.  As  I  think  of  it  now,  I  realize  that  I 
really  did  not  know  what  went  on  in  her;  whether 
she  had  set  a  trap  for  my  husband  or  yielded  to  an 
unconquerable  passion.  In  any  case  she  had  im 
agination  enough  to  see  that  unless  she  could  main 
tain  the  tragic  status,  she  cut  rather  a  ridiculous 
figure.  Sometimes  I  think  people  are  drawn  into 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  245 

these  affairs  not  so  much  by  the  hope  of  happiness 
as  the  need,  the  deep-seated,  desperate  need  of  emo 
tion,  any  kind  of  emotion.  I  think  if  we  had  taken 
her  note,  had  had  it  out  on  the  world-without-end 
basis,  she  would  have  been  almost  as  well  satisfied  by 
a  recognized  romantic  loss  as  by  success.  But  I 
never  knew  exactly.  She  was  equally  in  the  dark 
about  me.  Now  and  then  I  had  a  glimpse  of  the  figure 
I  was  in  her  eyes,  in  some  stricture  of  my  husband's 
gn  my  behaviour  —  some  criticism  which  bore  the 
stamp  of  her  suggestion;  it  was  as  if  he  was  being 
dragged  from  me  by  an  invisible  creature  of  which  I 
knew  nothing  but  an  occasional  scraping  of  its  claws. 
I  try  to  do  her  the  justice  in  my  mind,  of  thinking 
that  the  situation  which  she  had  built  up  out  of 
Tommy's  loneliness  was  as  real  for  her  as  it  was  for 
him.  Nobody  in  Higgleston  had  ever  taken  my 
natural  alienation  from  the  people  there  as  anything 
but  deliberate  and  despising.  To  her,  my  husband 
was  the  victim  of  a  cold,  neglectful  wife,  and  to  him 
she  contrived  to  be  a  figure  of  romance. 

"I  owe  her  a  lot,"  Tommy  insisted;  "she  has  suf 
fered  on  account  of  me."  He  went  back  to  that 
phrase  again,  "I  owe  her  a  lot." 

"What  do  you  owe  her  that  you  can't  pay?" 

"Well,  I  couldn't  marry  as  long  as  you " 

"You  want  to  marry  her?"  I  cried.  "You  want 
to  marry  her?  " 

"I  couldn't  expect  you  to  appreciate  her,"  Tommy 


246  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

was  sullen  again;  "you're  so  full  of  yourself."  I  held 
on  to  a  graver  matter. 

"You  want  us  to  be  divorced?"  I  can  hear  that 
sounding  hollowly  in  a  great  space  out  of  which  all 
other  interests  in  life  seemed  suddenly  to  shrink  and 
shrivel.  I  had  learned  to  talk  of  divorce  in  the 
great  world,  but  to  me  my  marriage  was  one  of  the 
incontrovertible  things. 

"We  might  as  well  be,"  I  heard  my  husband  say; 
"you  are  never  at  home  any  more."  Then  the  re 
action  set  in.  "Stay  with  me,  Olivia.  I  don't  want 
anybody  but  you;  just  stay  with  me!" 

"You  want  me  to  give  up  the  stage  and  live  here 
in  Higgleston  forever?  "  The  unfairness  of  this  over 
came  me. 

"Well,  why  not,  if  you're  married  to  me?" 

I  believe  he  would  have  done  it.  He  would  have 
wasted  me  like  that  and  thought  little  of  it.  I  was 
married,  and  not  altogether  to  Tommy,  but  to  Hig 
gleston  and  the  clothing  business.  The  condition 
he  demanded  of  me  was  not  of  loving  and  being 
faithful,  but  of  living  over  the  store.  Until  now, 
though  I  knew  I  did  not  love  my  husband  as  life 
had  taught  me  men  could  be  loved,  I  had  never  given 
up  expecting  to.  Somewhere,  somehow,  but  I  was 
certain  it  was  not  in  Higgleston,  the  transmuting 
touch  should  find  him  which  would  turn  my  hus 
band  into  the  Lord  of  Life.  Now  I  discovered  my 
self  pulled  over  into  another  point  of  view.  He  had 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  247 

become  a  man  capable  of  being  interested  in  the 
village  dressmaker.  The  farther  she  drew  him  from 
me  the  more  the  stripe  of  Higgleston  came  out  in 
him. 

I  had  planned  to  go  up  to  Chicago  for  a  week  in 
August;  to  consult  with  Mr.  Harding  about  the  plays 
he  was  to  produce  the  next  season.  I  had  not 
signed  with  him  yet,  but  I  knew  that  I  should,  that 
I  could  no  more  dissever  myself  from  th^at  connec 
tion  than  I  could  voluntarily  surrender  my  own 
breath;  I  might  try,  but  after  the  few  respirations 
withheld,  nature  would  have  her  way  with  me.  It 
was  not  that  I  came  to  a  decision  about  it;  the 
whole  matter  appeared  to  lie  in  that  region  of 
finality  that  made  the  assumption  of  a  decision 
ridiculous.  I  do  not  know  if  I  expected  to  divorce 
my  husband  or  if  he  or  Miss  Rathbone  expected  it. 
I  think  we  were  all  a  little  scared  by  the  situation 
we  had  evoked,  as  children  might  be  at  a  dog  they 
let  loose.  We  felt  the  shames  of  publicity  yelping 
at  our  heels. 

The  day  before  I  left,  I  went  to  see  Miss  Rathbone; 
I  had  to  have  a  skirt  shortened.  It  was  absurd,  of 
course,  but  there  was  really  no  one  else  to  go  to. 
If  there  had  been  I  shouldn't  have  dared;  all  Hig 
gleston  would  have  known  of  it  and  drawn  its  own 
conclusion.  As  it  was,  Higgleston  was  extremely 
dissatisfied  with  the  affair.  It  did  not  know  whom 
properly  to  blame,  me  for  neglecting  my  husband  or 


248  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

Miss  Rathbone  for  snapping  him  up;  they  felt  balked 
of  the  moral  conclusion. 

I  hardly  know  what  Miss  Rathbone  thought  of  my 
coming  to  her.  I  think  she  had  braved  herself  for 
some  sort  of  emotional  struggle  sharp  enough  to 
drown  the  whisper  of  reprobation.  My  quiet  accept 
ance  of  the  situation  left  her  somehow  toppling 
over  her  own  defences.  Sometimes  I  think  the 
emotionalism  which  the  attitude  of  that  time  de 
manded  to  be  worked  up  over  a  divorce,  drew  people 
to  it  with  that  impulse  which  leads  them  to  rush 
toward  a  fire  or  hurl  themselves  from  precipices. 
Miss  Rathbone  must  have  been  aching  to  fling  out  at 
me,  to  justify  her  own  position  by  abuse  of  mine, 
and  here  she  was  down  on  the  floor  with  her  mouth 
full  of  pins  squinting  at  the  line  of  my  skirt.  It  was 
then  that  I  told  her  what  I  was  going  to  Chicago  for. 
"  You'll  be  away  from  home  all  winter,  then?  "  The 
question  was  a  challenge. 

"I  don't  know,  I  haven't  signed  yet."  For  the 
life  of  me  I  couldn't  have  foreborne  that;  it  was 
exactly  the  kind  of  an  advantage  she  would  have 
taken  of  me.  If  I  chose  not  to  sign  for  the  next 
winter,  where  was  she?  She  stood  up  blindly  at 
last.  "I  guess  I  can  do  the  rest  without  you,"  she 
said.  Some  latent  instinct  of  fairness  flashed  up  in 
me. 

"But  I  think  I  shall  sign,"  I  admitted.  "I 
couldn't  stand  a  winter  in  Higgleston."  I  was  glad 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  249 

afterward  that  I  had  said  that;  it  gave  her  leave  for 
the  brief  time  that  was  left  to  them,  to  think  of  him 
as  being  given  into  her  hands. 

I  was  greatly  relieved  to  get  away,  even  for  a  week, 
from  the  cold  curiosity  of  Higgleston  which,  without 
saying  so,  had  made  me  perfectly  aware  that  I 
showed  I  had  been  crying  a  great  deal  lately. 
But  no  sooner  was  I  freed  from  the  pull  of  affection 
than  I  began  to  feel  a  deep  resentment  against 
Tommy.  His  attempt  to  charge  his  lapse  of  loyalty, 
on  my  art,  on  that  thing  in  me  which,  as  I  read  it, 
constituted  my  sole  claim  upon  consideration,  ap 
peared  a  deeper  indignity  than  his  interest  in  the 
dressmaker.  It  was  all  a  part  of  that  revelation 
which  sears  the  path  of  the  gifted  woman  as  with  a 
flame,  that  no  matter  what  her  value  to  society,  no 
man  will  spare  her  anything  except  as  she  pleases 
him.  At  the  first  summer  heat  of  it  I  felt  my  soul 
curl  at  the  edges.  His  repudiation  of  me  as  an 
actress  began  to  appear  a  slight  upon  all  that  world 
of  fineness  which  Art  upholds,  a  thing  not  to  be  tol 
erated  by  any  citizen  of  it.  In  its  last  analysis  it 
seemed  that  my  husband  had  deserted  me  in  favour 
of  Higgleston  quite  as  much  as  I  had  deserted  him, 
and  it  was  for  me  to  say  whether  I  should  consent 
to  it.  In  that  mood  I  met  Mr.  Harding  and  signed 
with  him  for  the  ensuing  season,  and  then  quite  un 
accountably,  ten  days  before  I  was  expected,  I  found 
myself  pulled  back  to  Higgleston.  I  had  wired 


250  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

Tommy,  and  was  surprised  to  have  Mr.  Ross  meet 
me  at  the  station. 

"Mr.  Bettersworth  is  not  very  well,"  he  explained, 
as  he  put  me  into  Higgleston's  one  omnibus.  "It 
came  on  him  rather  suddenly.  Some  kind  of  a 
seizure,"  he  admitted,  though  I  did  not  gather  from 
his  manner  that  it  was  particularly  serious  until  the 
'bus,  instead  of  stopping  at  our  store,  drove  straight 
on  up  the  one  wide  street. 

"I  thought  you'd  want  to  see  him  immediately," 
the  attorney  interposed  to  my  arresting  gesture. 
"You  see  he  was  taken  at  his  partner's  house."  He 
seemed  to  avoid  some  unpleasant  implication  by  not 
mentioning  Rathbone's  name. 

I  scarcely  remember  what  other  particulars  he 
gave  me  at  the  time;  my  next  sharp  impression  was 
of  my  husband  lying  white  and  breathing  heavily 
in  the  bed  in  the  Rathbone's  front  room,  the  drapery 
of  which  had  been  torn  hastily  down  to  make  room 
for  him,  regardless  of  the  finished  pieces  of  Miss 
Harvey's  trousseau  still  crowding  the  chairs  upon 
which  they  had  been  hastily  thrust.  Empty  sleeves 
hung  down  and  vaguely  seemed  to  reach  for  what 
they  could  not  clasp;  strangely  I  was  aware  in 
them  of  an  aching  lack  and  loss  which  must  have 
sprung  in  my  bosom.  I  took  my  husband's  hand  and 
it  dropped  back  from  my  clasp,  waxlike  and  nerve 
less.  I  think  I  had  been  kneeling  by  the  bed  for 
some  time,  talk  had  been  going  on  whisperingly 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  251 

around  me;  finally  the  light  faded  and  I  discovered 
that  the  doctor  had  gone.  The  beribboned  bridal 
garments  hung  limply  still  on  the  chairs  and  mocked 
me  with  their  empty  arms.  Presently  I  was  aware 
that  Miss  Rathbone  had  come  in  with  a  lamp.  She 
stood  there  on  the  other  side  of  the  bed  and  we 
looked  at  him  and  at  one  another. 

"How  long?"  I  asked  her. 

"Two  or  three  days  maybe,  the  doctor  says." 

"Will  he  know  me  again." 

"The  doctor  says  not." 

"Oh,  Tommy,  Tommy!"  I  began  to  shake  with 
suppressed  sobbing.  Miss  Rathbone  looked  at  me 
with  cold  resentment. 

"You  can  cry  as  much  as  you  like,  it  won't  dis 
turb  him,"  she  said. 

She  seemed  to  have  taken  the  fact  that  she  wasn't 
to  cry  herself,  as  final.  In  a  few  minutes  old  Rath- 
bone  shuffled  in  from  the  shop  and  stood  peering  at 
Tommy  with  his  little  red-lidded  eyes,  wiping  them 
furtively.  I  believe  the  old  man  was  fond  of  his 
partner  and  it  was  not  strange  to  him  that  Tommy 
should  be  lying  ill  at  his  home.  Miss  Rathbone  came 
and  took  him  by  the  shoulders  as  one  does  to  a  griev 
ing  child  and  turned  his  face  to  her  bosom.  She  was 
a  head  taller  than  he,  and  as  she  looked  across  him 
to  me  there  was  compulsion  in  her  look  and  pleading. 

"He  is  never  to  know,"  the  look  said,  and  I  looked 
back,  "Never." 


252  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

It  was  then  that  I  realized  how  genuine  her  affec 
tion  was  for  the  feeble,  snuffling  old  man;  she  would 
suffer  at  being  lessened  in  his  eyes. 

Some  one  came  and  took  me  away  for  a  while, 
and  by  degrees  I  got  to  know  the  'story.  It  had 
been  the  night  before,  just  about  the  time  I  was 
taken  with  that  strange  impulse  to  return,  that 
Tommy  had  shut  up  the  store  and  gone  over  to  the 
half -furnished  room  belonging  to  the  Board  of  Trade, 
which  had  become  a  sort  of  club  for  the  soberer 
men  of  the  community.  A  great  deal  of  talk  went 
on  there  which  gave  them  the  agreeable  impression 
of  something  being  done,  though  there  must  have 
been  much  of  it  of  the  character  of  that  which  was 
going  on  in  a  group  around  Montague  when  Tommy 
came  in  at  the  door.  He  came  in  very  quietly, 
blinded  by  the  light,  and  they  had  their  backs  to  him, 
shaking  with  the  loose  laughter  which  punctuates  a 
ribald  description.  Then  Montague's  voice  took  it 
up  again. 

"Rathbone'll  get  him,"  he  said.  "She's  got  the 
goods.  The  other  one  has  probably  got  somebody 
on  the  side;  these  actresses  are  all  alike." 

There  was  a  word  or  two  more  to  that  before 
Tommy's  fist  in  his  jaw  stopped  him.  Montague 
struck  back,  he  was  a  heavier  man  than  my  husband, 
but  in  a  minute  the  others  had  rushed  in  between 
them.  They  were  drawn  back  and  held;  Tommy's 
nose  bled  profusely,  he  appeared  dazed,  and  accepted 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  253 

Montague's  forced  apology  without  a  word.  The  men 
were  all  scared  and  yet  excited;  some  of  them  were 
ashamed  of  themselves.  They  suspected  it  was  not  the 
sort  of  thing  that  should  go  on  at  a  Board  of  Trade, 
and  agreed  it  ought  to  be  kept  out  of  the  papers. 
Some  one  walked  home  with  my  husband,  and  on  the 
way  he  was  seized  with  a  violent  fit  of  vomiting. 

"Who  was  it  hit  me?"  he  asked  at  the  door,  and 
seemed  but  vaguely  to  remember  what  it  was  about. 
The  next  morning  he  opened  the  store  as  usual  and 
appeared  quite  himself  to  old  Rathbone,  who  came 
shuffling  and  sidestepping  in  to  his  nest  at  the  ac 
customed  hour.  About  half-past  ten  the  tailor  was 
made  aware  by  the  rapping  of  a  customer  on  the 
deserted  counter,  that  Tommy  had  gone  out  without 
a  word.  He  must  have  gone  straight  to  Miss  Rath- 
bone;  those  who  met  him  on  the  street  recalled  that 
his  gait  was  unsteady.  She  must  have  been  greatly 
concerned  to  have  him  there  at  that  hour,  for  people 
were  moving  about  the  streets  and  customers  begin 
ning  to  come  in,  and  in  the  presence  of  Tillie  Heming 
way  he  could  offer  her  no  adequate  explanation. 

She  was  desperately  revolving  the  risk  of  taking 
him  into  the  front  room  to  have  out  of  him  what  his 
distrait  presence  half  declared,  when  he  was  taken 
with  a  momentary  retching,  she  went  into  the  next 
room  to  fetch  him  a  glass  of  water  and  a  moment 
after  her  back  was  turned  she  heard  him  pitch  for 
ward  on  the  floor. 


254  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

When  Rathbone  had  sent  for  me  by  the  wire  that 
passed  me  on  the  way  home,  he  sent  also  to  Tommy's 
father,  who  got  in  before  noon  the  next  day.  I  re 
member  him  as  a  quizzical  sort  of  man  always  with  his 
hands  in  his  pockets,  and  a  bristling  brown  moustache 
cut  off  square  with  his  upper  lip,  and  a  better  under 
standing  of  the  situation  than  he  had  any  intention 
of  admitting.  I  had  by  some  unconscious  means 
derived  from  him  that  though  he  was  fond  of  Tommy, 
he  never  had  much  opinion  of  his  capacity.  I  think 
now  it  must  have  been  his  presence  there  and  his 
manner  of  being  likely  to  do  the  most  unexpected 
thing,  that  pulled  those  same  live  business  men 
who  had  stood  listening  in  loose-mouthed  relish  of 
Monty's  ribaldry  back  to  the  consideration  of  the 
town's  repute  as  a  place  where  such  things  could  not 
possibly  happen.  They  began  to  see  something  more 
serious  than  entertainment  in  their  own  complicity 
in  my  husband's  death.  By  the  time  Forester  came  on, 
a  covert  discretion  had  supplied  the  event  with  its 
sole  consoling  circumstance  of  secrecy.  Not  even 
my  family  got  to  know  what  led  up  to  that  blow 
which  had  precipitated  an  unsuspected  weakness. 
It  was  quite  in  accordance  with  what  they  believed 
of  the  life  I  had  chosen,  that  my  husband's  death  in 
a  brawl  should  be  among  its  contingencies.  Poor 
Tommy's  end  took  on  a  tinge  of  theatricality. 

It  was  toward  the  end  of  the  second  day  that  he 
began  to  respond  to  the  stimulants  the  doctor  had 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  255 

been  pouring  into  him.  He  opened  his  eyes  and 
looked  at  us,  conscious,  but  out  of  all  present  time. 
Feebly  his  glance  roved  over  the  figures  by  the  bed, 
and  fell  at  last  on  me. 

"Ollie,"  he  whispered,  "Ollie!"  It  was  a  name 
he  had  not  called  for  a  long  time. 

"Oh,  my  dear,  my  dear!"  I  took  his  hand  again 
and  felt  a  faint  pressure.  Miss  Rathbone  hardly 
dared  to  look  at  him  with  the  others  standing  about. 
I  whispered  her  name  to  him,  and  his  partner's, 
but  he  did  not  so  much  as  turn  his  eyes  in  their 
direction.  I  could  see  him  studying  me  out  of  half- 
shut  glances;  there  would  be  an  appreciable  interval 
before  the  sense  of  what  he  saw  penetrated  the  dulled 
brain ;  I  thought  I  knew  the  very  moment  when  the 
significance  of  our  standing  all  about  his  bed  crying, 
took  hold  of  him.  All  at  once  he  spoke  out  clearly: 

"Is  my  father  here?"  I  fancied  he  must  have  hit 
on  that  question  as  a  confirmation;  but  before  there 
could  be  any  talk  between  them  he  slid  off  again 
into  the  deeps  of  insensibility.  At  the  end  of  half 
an  hour  or  so  he  started  up  almost  strongly. 

"Ollie!"  he  demanded,  "where  is  the  baby?" 

"Asleep,"  I  told  him. 

"Then  I  will  sleep  too,"  he  said,  and  in  a  little 
while  it  was  so. 

The  Odd  Fellows  took  charge  of  my  husband's 
funeral;  his  body  was  moved  from  the  Rathbones', 


256  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

to  their  hall  and  did  not  go  back  again  to  the  rooms 
over  the  store.  Miss  Rathbone  made  up  my  crape 
for  me.  I  believe  it  gave  her  a  little  comfort  to  do  so. 
Forester  came  and  settled  up  my  husband's  affairs;  he 
was  rather  inclined  to  resent  what  he  felt  was  an 
effort  of  the  Rathbones  to  claim  a  larger  share  in 
the  business  than  the  books  showed,  but  he  thought 
my  indifference  natural  to  my  grief.  He  was 
shocked  a  little  at  my  determination  to  go  on  with 
my  engagement;  we  were  not  so  poor  he  thought, 
that  I  could  not  afford  a  little  retirement  to  my 
widowhood.  But  in  that  strange  renewal  of  com 
munion  after  death,  I  felt  my  husband  nearer  than 
before.  He  would  go  with  me  at  last  out  of  Hig- 
gleston.  Strangely,  I  wanted  to  see  Miss  Rath- 
bone,  but  she  kept  away  from  me.  That  was  as  it 
should  have  been  in  Higgleston.  She  had  tried  to 
get  my  husband,  she  had  been,  in  a  way,  the  death 
of  him.  It  was  hardly  expected  that  I  could  bear 
the  sight  of  her,  though  it  would  have  been  Christian 
to  forgive  her. 

I  did  see  her,  however,  the  night  before  I  went 
away.  It  was  the  dusk  of  the  first  of  September. 
There  was  a  moon  coming  up,  large  and  dulled  at  the 
edges  by  the  haze,  and  that  strange  earthy  smell 
with  the  hint  of  decay  in  it,  kept  in  by  the  banded 
mists  that  lay  below  the  moon.  The  darkness  crept 
close  along  the  earth  and  spread  upward  like  an 
exhalation  into  the  sky  where  almost  the  full  day 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  257 

halted.  I  had  slipped  out  down  a  side  street  and 
across  an  open  lot  to  the  cemetery.  I  would  have 
that  hour  with  my  dead  free  from  observation. 

I  went  between  the  white  head  stones  and  the 
flower  borders.  As  I  neared  my  husband's  grave, 
something  moved  upon  it.  It  arose  out  of  the  low 
mound  as  I  approached;  for  one  heart-riving  second 
I  stopped,  speechless;  it  moved  again  and  showed  a 
woman. 

"Miss  Rathbone!"  I  called.  "Henrietta!"  I 
had  not  used  her  name  before;  I  have  just  now  re 
membered  it. 

"You  might  have  left  me  this,"  she  said.  I  saw 
that  she  had  covered  the  mound  with  flowers,  and  I 
was  glad  I  had  not  brought  any. 

"I  am  leaving,"  I  answered.  "I  am  going  to 
morrow  .  .  .  where  my  work  is." 

"Yes,  you  can  go.  But  I  have  to  stay  .  .  .  where 
my  work  is.  I  stay  with  him.  You  can  go  ...  you 
always  wanted  to  go.  And  I,  I  have  been  talked 
about  and  I  daren't  even  cry  for  him,  not  even  at 
night,  for  my  father  hears  me."  She  was  crying 
now,  deeply,  bitterly.  "You  never  cared  for  him," 
she  insisted,  "and  now  he  knows  it;  he  knows  and 
has  come  back  to  me  ...  to  me." 

"He  comes  back,"  I  admitted.  I  was  stricken 
suddenly  with  the  futility  of  all  human  conviction. 
Moving  about  the  house  that  day  I  had  been  con 
scious  of  him  beside  me  then;  and  now,  lying  there 


258  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

beside  my  boy,  touching  him  .  .  .  mine  .  .  .  sealed 
to  me  in  the  certainty  of  death.  And  he  had  come 
back  to  her.  I  did  not  know  even  now  what  she 
and  my  husband  had  been  to  one  another. 

It  swept  over  me  somehow,  drowningly,  that  this 
was  the  secret  that  the  dead  know,  how  to  belong  to 
all  of  us.  They  had  no  bond,  how  could  they  be  un 
faithful?  For  a  moment  I  was  caught  up  by  the 
thought  to  nobility. 

"Look  here,  Henrietta,  if  you  feel  that  way,  I'll 
leave  it  to  you.  I'll  not  come  here  any  more."  I 
did  not  know  what  else  I  could  do  about  it. 

"It's  the  least  you  can  do."  She  was  accepting 
it  as  her  right.  Any  woman  will  understand  how  I 
wanted  to  lay  my  hand  there,  above  his  breast.  She 
must  really  have  believed  I  did  not  love  him.  I 
turned  back  across  the  borders. 

"Good-bye,  Henrietta."  She  made  a  nearly  in 
articulate  sound.  The  last  I  saw  of  her  in  the  dusk 
she  was  tucking  her  flowers  into  the  fresh  sod  as 
one  tucks  a  coverlet  about  a  child.  He  had  been,  I 
suppose,  both  man  and  child  to  her. 


BOOK  III 


CHAPTER   I 

I  HAVE  to  take  up  my  story  again  about  eighteen 
months  later  at  the  point  of  my  going  out  to  Sub 
urbia  to  ask  Gerald  McDermott  for  a  part  in  his  new 
play,  which  was  being  rehearsed  with  Sarah  in  the 
role  of  Bettina.  But  before  that  there  had  been 
some  rather  mortifying  experiences  to  teach  me  that 
though  I  was  done  with  Higgleston,  it  was,  to  a 
certainty,  not  done  with  me.  In  any  case  I  suppose 
the  shock  of  my  husband's  death  must  have  affected 
my  work  unfavourably,  but  the  knowledge  of  his 
secret  defection,  and  the  excuse  he  found  for  it  in 
what  was  best  in  me,  made  still  corroding  poison  at 
the  bottom  of  my  wound. 

What  it  all  amounted  to  in  my  career  was  that 
the  season  which  should  have  swept  me  back  to 
Chicago  in  triumphant  establishment  of  my  gift, 
trickled  out  in  faint  praise  and  cold  esteem.  It  was 
not  that  you  could  place  your  finger  and  say  just 
there  was  the  difficulty,  but  what  came  of  it  was 
another  year  on  the  road  with  Cline  and  Erskine, 
in  stock.  The  Hardings,  notwithstanding  their 
disappointment  in  what  they  expected  to  make 
of  me,  managed  to  be  kind. 

"You'll  pull  up,"  they  assured  me;  "it's  because 

261 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

you  are  really  an  artist  that  you  show  what  you've 
been  through!"  And  they  didn't  know  the  half  of 
what  that  was. 

To  Henry  Mills  my  engagement  with  Cline  and 
Erskine  was  a  step  forward  into  that  blazoned  and 
banal  professionalism  which  passes  in  America  for 
dramatic  success;  but  Sarah  knew,  and  I  think  I 
knew  myself,  that  the  dance  they  led  us  in  the  spot 
light  of  copious  advertisement,  was  a  dance  of  death 
to  much  that  the  plastic  art  should  be.  In  this 
instance  it  was  demonstrated  even  to  the  hopeful 
eye  of  Henry  Mills,  for  the  play  chosen  proved  so 
little  suited  to  the  semi-rural,  Middle  West  cities 
where  we  played  it,  that  before  the  season  was  half 
over  we  were  recalled,  and,  after  an  empty  interval, 
finished  out  the  engagement  in  one  of  those  sensa 
tion  mongering  shows  with  which  such  combinations 
as  Cline  and  Erskine  clutch  at  the  fleeing  skirts  of  a 
public  they  never  understand. 

It  was  about  a  month  after  the  closing  of  this 
engagement  that  I  took  Sarah's  suggestion  about 
applying  to  Gerald  McDermott,  but  not  before  I  had 
tried  several  other  things.  The  truth  was,  as  I  knew 
very  well  when  I  faced  it,  that  I  had  at  the  time 
nothing  in  me.  To  those  who  haven't  it,  a  gift  is  a 
sort  of  extra  possession,  like  an  eye  or  a  hand  that 
can  be  commanded  to  its  accustomed  trick  on  any 
occasion;  but  to  the  owners  of  it  it  is  a  libation 
poured  to  the  Unknown  God.  I  had  emptied  my 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  263 

cup  of  its  froth  of  youth,  and  as  yet  nothing  had 
touched  the  profounder  experience  from  which  it 
should  be  fed  and  filled  again,  and  I  had  no  technique 
to  supply  the  insufficiencies  of  my  inspiration.  Some 
where  within  me  I  felt  the  stuff  of  power,  stiff  and 
unworkable,  needing  the  flux  of  passion  and  the 
shaping  hand  of  skill. 

Looking  back  now  from  the  vantage  of  a  tolerable 
success,  if  you  were  to  ask  me  what,  more  than  any 
other  thing,  prevents  the  fulness  of  our  native  art, 
I  should  say  the  blank  public  misapprehension  of  its 
processes.  Turning  every  way  to  catch  the  favour 
able  wind,  what  met  me  then,  was  the  general  con 
viction  on  the  part  of  my  friends  that  if  you  had 
talent  you  succeeded  anyway,  and  if  you  weren't 
succeeding  it  was  because  you  hadn't  any  talent. 
I  suffered  many  humiliations  before  I  learned  how 
absolutely,  by  that  same  society  that  so  liberally 
resents  the  implication  of  any  separateness  in  art, 
the  artist  is  thrust  back  upon  himself.  To  do  what 
seemed  necessary  for  the  development  of  my  gift,  to 
have  a  year  or  two  to  travel  and  study,  to  connote  its 
powers  with  its  limitations,  required  money;  and 
though  here  in  Chicago  there  was  money  for  every 
sort  of  adventure  that  stirred  the  imagination  of 
man,  there  was  none  for  the  particular  sort  of 
investment  I  represented.  At  least  not  at  the 
price  I  was  prepared  to  pay. 

The  half  of  what  had  been  put  into  setting  my 


264  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

brother  on  his  feet  would  have  served  me,  but  I 
learned  from  Effie,  that  as  much  of  my  mother's 
capital  as  had  been  put  into  Forester's  business, 
was  not  only  impossible  to  be  withdrawn  from 
keeping  him  upright,  but  threatened  not  to  hold 
him  so  for  as  long  as  it  was  necessary  for  mother 
to  see  in  him  the  figure  of  a  provider.  This 
had  been  made  plain  at  Christmas,  when  Effie 
had  written  me  that  a  particular  wheeled  chair  which 
my  mother  had  set  her  heart  upon  because  of  a  hope 
it  held  out  of  church-going,  would  be  impossible 
unless  I  came  forward  handsomely.  I  did  come 
forward  on  a  scale  commensurate  with  the  Taylor- 
ville  estimate  of  my  salary,  which  was  by  no  means 
comparable  to  its  purchasing  power  in  Chicago;  and 
now  I  was  beginning  to  realize  that  unless  some  one 
came  forward  for  me,  I  stood  to  lose  the  Shining 
Destiny  to  which  I  felt  myself  appointed.  I  was 
slow  in  understanding  that  it  was  not  to  be  looked 
for  by  any  of  the  paths  by  which  interest  and  suc 
cour  are  traditionally  due.  Not,  for  instance,  from 
Pauline  and  Henry  Mills. 

I  was  seeing  a  great  deal  of  them  since  I  had  come 
to  Chicago,  not  only  because  of  our  earlier  friend 
ship,  but  because  I  found  myself  constantly  thrown 
back  on  all  that  they  stood  for,  by  my  distaste  for 
much  that  I  saw  myself  implicated  in  as  a  theatrical 
star  who  had  not  quite  made  good.  I  hated,  quite 
unjustly,  I  believe,  the  players  with  whom  for  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  265 

time  I  was  professionally  classed;  I  loathed  the 
shallow  shop  talk,  the  makeshift  rooms  we  lived  in, 
the  outward  smartness  and  the  pinch  of  anxiety  it 
covered.  I  was  irritated  by  my  external  and  cir 
cumstantial  resemblance  to  much  that  I  felt  instinc 
tively,  kept  them  where  they  were,  and  vexed  at 
some  cheapness  in  myself  which  seemed  to  be  re 
vealed  by  the  irritation.  I  had  been  thrown  up  out 
of  the  freemasonry  of  the  preliminary  struggle  into 
a  kind  of  backwater  of  established  second-rateness, 
where  there  were  also  second-rate  manners  and  morals 
and  social  perceptions.  It  was  a  great  relief  to  get 
away  from  it  to  Pauline's  home  in  Evanston,  and  the 
air  it  had  of  being  somehow  established  at  the  pivot 
of  existence.  Pauline  had  two  children  by  now,  and 
a  manner  of  being  abundantly  equal  to  the  world  in 
which  she  moved,  a  manner  which  I  was  only  just 
realizing  was  largely  owing  to  the  figure  of  her 
husband's  income.  What  Pauline  furnished  me  at 
her  home,  over  and  above  the  real  affection  there  was 
still  between  us,  was  a  sort  of  continuous  perform 
ance  of  the  domestic  virtues. 

That  faculty  for  knowing  exactly  what  she  wanted, 
which  had  led  her  to  make  the  most  of  her  house 
keeping  allowance  in  the  days  when  making  the 
most  of  it  was  her  chief  occupation,  now  that  the 
centres  of  her  activity  had  been  shifted  from  the 
practical  to  the  social  and  cultural,  stood  her  in 
remarkable  stead.  I  was  constantly  amazed  by 


266  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  celerity  and  sureness  with  which  she  seized  on 
just  the  attitude  or  opinion  which  suited  best  with 
the  part  she  had  cast,  herself  for  as  the  perfect  wife 
and  mother.  It  was  only  when  I  discovered  its 
complete  want  of  relativity  to  the  purpose  of  the 
play  or  to  the  rest  of  the  company,  that  I  was  not 
taken  in  by  it.  I  doubt  now  if  Pauline  ever  had  an 
idea  or  permitted  herself  a  behaviour  which  was  not 
conditioned  by  the  pattern  she  had  set  for  herself, 
which  she  intrigued  both  Henry  and  myself  into 
believing  was  the  only  real  and  appreciable  life. 

At  the  time  of  which  I  write  it  was  a  great  comfort 
to  me  to  get  away  from  my  own  dreary  profession 
alism,  to  the  nursery  at  Evanston,  or  to  add  my 
small  flourish  to  the  scene  a  faire  of  Henry's  home 
coming,  made  every  day  to  seem  the  one  event  for 
which  the  household  waited,  from  which,  indeed,  it 
took  its  excuse  for  being.  For  all  of  this  was  so  well 
in  line  with  what  Henry,  who  with  the  amplification 
of  his  income  had  taken  on  a  due  rotundity  of  out 
line  and  a  slight  tendency  to  baldness,  conceived  as 
proper  for  a  man's  home  to  be,  that  he  played  up  to 
it  as  much  as  was  in  him.  He  had  still  his  air  of 
knowingness  about  the  theatre,  and  if  there  was  at 
times  in  his  manner  a  suggestion  that  he  might  have 
found  it  pleasanter  to  adjust  his  relation  to  me  on  the 
basis  of  what  I  was  as  an  actress,  if  I  had  not  been 
quite  so  much  the  friend,  it  was  so  far  modified  by  his 
genuine  admiration  for  his  wife  and  his  cession  to  her 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  267 

of  every  right  of  judgment  in  the  home,  that  I  was 
inclined  to  accept  him  at  his  own  and  Pauline's 
estimate  as  the  model  husband. 

It  was  only  a  few  days  before  my  visit  to  Gerald 
McDermott,  that  I  had  undertaken  to  state  to  Paul 
ine  the  nature  of  the  help  I  required  and  my  title  to  it. 
I  had  gone  out  to  dinner  and  found  her  putting  on  a 
new  gown,  one  of  those  garments  admirably  con 
trived  between  the  smartness  of  evening  dress  and 
the  intimacy  of  negligee,  in  which  Evanston  ladies  of 
that  period  were  wont  to  receive  their  lords. 

"I'm  needing  something  new  myself,"  I  said  for  a 
beginning,  "and  I'm  divided  between  the  certainty 
that  if  I  don't  get  an  engagement  I  can't  afford  it, 
and  if  I  don't  afford  it  I  probably  won't  get  an 
engagement."  Pauline  stopped  in  the  process  of 
hooking  up,  to  take  stock  of  me. 

"You  absurd  child!"  The  note  of  amused  ad 
monition  with  which  she  ordinarily  accepted  my 
professional  exigencies  turned  on  the  note  of  cor 
rection.  "Don't  you  think  you  put  too  much  stress 
on  those  things?" 

"What  things?"  She  had  touched  upon  the  spring 
of  irritation. 

"Clothes,  you  know,  and  appearances.  Isn't 
it  better  just  to  do  your  work  well  and  rest  upon 
that?" 

"Pauline,  if  you  had  ever  looked  for  an  engage 
ment  you  would  know  that  getting  it  is  largely  a 


268  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

matter  of  appearing  equal  to  it,  and  clothes  are  the 
better  part  of  appearing. " 

"But  if  you  know  that  your  work  is  good,  what 
do  you  care  what  people  think  of  you?"  I  dodged 
the  moral  situation  about  to  be  precipitated  on  me. 

"It's  about  the  only  way  you  know  it  is  good, 
knowing  what  people  think  of  it." 

"Now  see  here,"  Pauline  protested,  reinforced  by 
the  evident  superiority  of  her  viewpoint  to  mine, 
"you're  getting  all  wrong;  these  things  you  are 
thinking  of,  they  are  not  the  real  things;  they  don't 
count,  not  in  the  long  run;  it's  only  the  spiritual 
things  that  really  matter."  She  had  put  on  all  the 
plastic  effect  of  nobility  that  was  part  of  her  .stock 
in  trade  with  Henry  Mills.  I  thrust  out  against  it 
sharply. 

"Do  you  realize,  Pauline,  that  if  I  don't  get  an 
engagement  soon  I  shan't  be  able  to  pay  my  board?" 

"Oh,  you  poor  dear!"  She  came  over  and  took 
my  hand.  I  don't  know  why  women  like  Pauline 
do  that,  but  when  they  do  it  it  is  a  sign  they  are  not 
equal  to  the  situation  and  are  trying  to  fake  it  with 
you. 

"I  know  it  is  hard"  —  she  found  the  cooing  note 
with  facility  —  "but  it  will  come  right;  it  always 
does.  I've  always  found  that  there  is  a  way  pro 
vided." 

Something  flashed  into  my  mind  that  I  had  read 
in  the  newspapers  recently  about  the  corporations 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  269 

Henry  worked  for,  and  I  wondered  if  Pauline  had  the 
least  notion  how  the  way,  for  her,  was  humanly  pro 
vided,  but  the  sound  of  Henry's  latchkey  put  an  end 
to  the  conversation,  which  I  hadn't  felt  sufficiently 
encouraging  to  warrant  my  taking  up  again. 

I  went  from  Pauline's,  at  the  very  first  opportu 
nity,  to  Sarah  Croyden,  who  was  playing  in  Chicago, 
and  doing  her  kindliest  to  blow  the  wind  of  hope  into 
my  sagging  sails.  I  met  Cecelia  Brune  there.  It 
had  been  to  me  the  witness  of  how  far  I  had  fallen 
from  my  mark,  that  I  had  been  thrown  with  her  again 
in  my  last  engagement.  Hers  was  the  sort  of  talent 
that  Cline  and  Erskine  could  play  up  to  the  limit  of 
the  inadmissible.  There  were  not  wanting  inti 
mations  that  Cecelia  had  moved  her  own  limit  a 
notch  or  two  in  that  direction.  She  had  taken  a 
characteristic  view  of  my  reappearance  in  her  neigh 
bourhood. 

"Got  into  the  band-wagon,  didn't  you?"  she 
remarked.  "I  saw  Dean  on  the  road  last  year  and 
she  said  you  was  going  in  for  high-brow  stunts. 
Nothin'  to  it.  You  stay  with  Cline  and  Erskine; 
they  get  you  on  like  anything. "  Her  own  notion  of 
getting  on  was  to  figure  as  the  sole  female  attraction 
in  a  song  and  dance  skit  in  what  she  pronounced 
"Vawdville." 

"It's  the  only  place  havin'  a  figgur  does  you  any 
good!"  That  she  did  not  recommend  it  for  me  must 
be  taken  for  her  estimate  of  mine.  Nevertheless  I 


270  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

was  amused  by  her,  and  Sarah,  I  knew,  was  even  a 
little  fond.  Sarah's  affections  were  a  sort  of  natural 
emanation  from  her,  like  the  rays  of  a  candle,  and 
warmed  all  they  lighted  on.  On  this  afternoon 
I  found  Cecelia  drinking  tea  there  and  I  wasn't 
able  to  conceal  my  professional  depression  from  her 
sharp,  shallow  inquisitiveness.  There  were  never 
two  or  three  players  got  together,  I  believe,  but  the 
talk  turned  on  the  comparative  ineffectualness  of 
Merit  as  against  Pull  in  the  struggle  for  success. 

"There's  no  two  ways  about  it,"  insisted  Cecelia 
Brune;  "y°u  gotta  get  a  hold  of  some  rich  guy  and 
freeze  to  him."  The  extent  to  which  Cecelia  had 
blossomed  out  in  ostrich  tips  and  orchids  that 
bright  spring  afternoon,  might  have  suggested  to  an 
experienced  eye,  that  the  freezing  process  had  already 
begun.  I  say  might  have,  because  Sarah  and  I 
found  it  difficult  to  disassociate  her  from  the  hard, 
grubby  innocence  in  which  our  acquaintance  had 
begun.  Sarah,  I  know,  believed  in  her  and  had  her 
in  often  to  informal  occasions  as  a  bulwark  against 
what,  with  all  her  faith  and  pains,  she  didn't  finally 
save  her  from. 

"You  can  talk  all  you  want  to,"  Cecelia  assever 
ated,  "about  man  being  the  natural  provider.  I've 
noticed  he  don't  work  at  the  job  much  without  he's 
gettin'  something  out  of  it.  If  you're  sufferin'  with 
that  little  old  song  and  dance  about  men  doin'  for 
you  because  you're  a  woman  and  need  it,  you  gotta 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  271 

get  over  it.  There's  nothin'  laid  down  over  that 
counter  unless  you  deliver  the  goods."  She  was 
nibbling  lumps  of  sugar  moistened  in  her  tea,  and  the 
wild  rose  of  her  cheeks  and  the  distracting  rings  of  her 
hair  made  her  offensiveness  a  mere  childish  imper 
tinence. 

"Look  at  Helen  Matlock,"  she  ran  on,  "gettin* 
five  hundred  a  week.  And  when  old  Sedgwick  put 
it  up  to  her  she  said  she'd  die  rather;  and  then  she 
went  home  and  found  her  mother  sick,  and  what 
did  she  do?  Never  batted  an  eye,  but  told  her  she'd 
got  an  engagement,  and  went  back  and  made  it 
good.  An'  now  she's  gettin'  five  hundred.  That's 
what  I  call  doin'  well  by  yourself. " 

"She  can't  mean  it,"  Sarah  extenuated  when  Ce 
celia  had  gone;  "she's  too  frank  about  it.  When 
she  stops  talking  I  shall  begin  to  suspect  her. " 

"But  is  it  true,  about  Miss  Matlock,  I  mean?" 
Just  at  that  juncture  Helen  Matlock  was  doing  the 
work  I  felt  most  drawn  to,  most  fit  to  undertake. 

"I  suppose  so,"  Sarah  allowed;  "it's  a  common 
saying  that  the  way  to  the  footlights  in  the  Majestic 
is  through  the  manager's  private  room."  She  came 
over  and  sat  beside  me  on  the  bed,  which,  under  a 
Bagdad  curtain,  did  duty  as  a  couch.  "There  are 
other  theatres  besides  the  Majestic, "  she  said. 

"None  that  want  me,"  I  averred. 

"Oh,"  she  cried,  "you  don't  mean ?" 

"No,"  I  had  to  own,  "I  don't  mean  that  I  have  a 


272  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

chance  to  get  on  even  by  misbehaving  myself.  I'm 
not  the  kind  to  whom  that  sort  of  chance  comes." 
Sarah  stroked  my  hand  a  while. 

"I've  been  thinking,  if  you  could  get  a  small  part 
for  a  season,  you  could  take  it  under  another  name 
until  you  are  quite  yourself  again.  It's  often  done. " 
I  could  see  she  had  gone  much  farther  than  that  with 
it  in  her  thought.  It  was  just  such  cover  as  that  I 
was  seeking  for  the  renaissance  of  my  acting  power. 

And  that  was  what  led  to  my  going  out  to  Subur 
bia  to  see  Gerald  McDermott  about  the  part  of  Mrs. 
Brandis  in  "The  Futurist." 

It  was  out  quite  in  the  frayed  edge  of  outer  fringe  of 
real  estate  ventures  which  hedged  Chicago  round,  in  a 
district  which  was  spoiled  for  country  and  not  quite 
made  into  town,  and  from  the  number  of  weedy  plots 
not  built  upon  between  the  scroll-saw  cottages,  had 
almost  a  rural  air.  Leaning  trolleys  went  zizzing 
along  the  banked  highways,  and  at  the  ends  of  the 
unpaved  avenues  there  were  flat  gleams  of  the  lake. 
Depressed  as  I  was  by  the  consciousness  of  having 
fallen  from  the  estate  of  actresses  who  command 
engagements  to  the  lot  of  those  who  seek  them,  I  was 
still  able  to  be  touched  by  curiosity  by  what  Sarah 
had  told  me  of  McDermott  and  his  wife,  whom  he  had 
married  for  her  pretty,  feminine  inconsequence,  and 
who,  having  no  point  of  attachment  to  her  husband's 
life  but  femininity,  was  able  to  imagine  none  for  any 
other  woman,  and  suffered  incredibly  in  consequence. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  273 

"If  one  could  only  discover  why  clever  men  marry 
that  sort  of  women!"  I  wondered. 

"Oh,  Jerry  thought  he  was  going  to  bend  her  to  his 
will,"  Sarah  explained.  "But  that  kind  don't  bend, 
they  just  slump. "  I  had  hardly  knocked  at  the  door 
before  I  had  an  inkling  of  how  painful  to  the  author 
of  "The  Futurist"  the  process  of  slumping  might  be. 

I  could  hear  the  fretting  of  a  child,  hushed  sud 
denly  by  my  knock,  then  the  patter  of  little  feet 
across  the  floor  and  voices  startled  and  pitched  low. 
I  was  just  debating  whether  I  shouldn't  pretend  I 
hadn't  heard  anything  and  go  away  again,  when 
Mr.  McDermott  opened  the  door.  I  had  met  him 
once  at  Sarah's  and  should  have  known  him  again 
by  the  pallor  of  his  countenance  against  the  dead 
blackness  of  his  hair,  straight  and  shining  like  an 
Indian's.  The  effect  of  boyishness  that  one  derived 
from  his  tall,  thin  figure  was  increased  now  by  the 
marks  of  weeping  about  his  eyes.  In  the  glimpse  of 
the  room  behind  him  I  was  aware  of  a  disorder  only 
excusable  in  the  face  of  a  family  catastrophe;  one  of 
the  children  that  ran  to  his  knee  was  still  in  its  little 
petticoat,  without  a  slip,  and  had  not  been  washed 
or  combed  that  day.  I  wavered  an  instant  between 
the  obligation  of  politeness  to  ignore  the  situation 
and  the  certainty  that  I  couldn't. 

"  Oh ! "  I  cried.  I  snatched  at  my  repertory  for  the 
proper  mixture  of  commiseration  and  consternation. 
," Is  any  one  ill?" 


274  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

His  desperate  need  of  help  opened  the  door  to  me. 

"  My  wife  "...  he  began,  but  the  state  of  the  room 
accounted  for  that,  as  he  perceived,  taking  it  in  afresh 
through  my  eyes.  Mrs.  McDermott  was  lying  on 
the  sofa  in  the  coma  of  exhaustion.  She  lifted  her  face 
to  me  for  a  moment,  swollen  with  crying,  and  then 
let  herself  go  again  into  that  pit  in  which  a  woman 
sinks  an  impossible  situation.  She  was  really 
faint,  poor  thing,  and,  if  I  judged  by  the  state  of  the 
house,  had  had  no  luncheon.  I  took  all  that  in  at 
a  glance,  but  it  was  none  of  my  business. 

"Is  it  her  heart?"  I  wanted  to  know  of  her  hus 
band  as  I  bent  over  her.  He  caught  up  the  sug 
gestion  eagerly. 

"Yes,  her  heart  .  .  .  she  is  very  weak."  He  did 
whatever  I  suggested  on  that  explanation.  I  would 
have  proposed  putting  her  to  bed  if  I  had  not  feared 
that  that  would  involve  more  revelations  of  the 
family  disorder  than  I  was  willing  to  tax  him  with. 

We  got  her  out  of  her  f aintness  presently  and  found 
her  a  safety  valve  in  pitying  her  poor  children  with 
that  sloppy  sort  of  maternal  affection  which  is  not 
inconsistent  with  a  good  deal  of  neglect.  I  wasn't 
working  for  anything  but  to  save  Jerry  —  I  came  to 
call  him  that  before  many  weeks  —  from  the  embar 
rassment  of  what  I  was  sure  had  been  a  family  fracas 
which  threatened  at  every  moment  to  break  out 
again.  I  suggested  tea,  for  I  was  satisfied  that  both 
of  them  wanted  food,  and  while  I  was  making  toast  | 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  875 

before  the  sitting-room  fire,  Mrs.  McDermott  man 
aged  to  get  herself  and  the  children  into  some  sort 
of  order.  I  could  see  then  how  pretty  she  had 
been  in  a  large-eyed,  short-lipped  way,  and  how 
charming  in  her  youth  had  been  the  inconsequence 
which  as  the  mistress  of  a  family  made  her  a  sloven. 
Not  to  seem  to  notice  too  much  the  superficial  air  of 
being  prepared  for  company  which  she  managed  to 
give  the  children  by  washing  their  faces  surrepti 
tiously,  I  explained  to  Mr.  McDermott  that  I  had 
come  about  the  part  of  Mrs.  Brandis. 

"Oh,  you'll  do,"  he  assented  heartily.  "You'll 
do  just  as  you  are.  Mrs.  Brandis  is  a  widow  you  know 
.  .  .  that  is,  the  Mrs.  Brandis  that  I  created " 

"Just  as  you  conceived  it  of  course,"  I  insisted, 
"I  should  want  to  play  it  that  way." 

"The  trouble  is  that  Moresco  isn't  satisfied  so 
easily;  he  wants  me  to  make  changes  in  the  part." 

"Well  .  .  .   "  I  was  prepared  to  make  concessions. 

"I'm  afraid  he  has  somebody  in  mind  .  .  .   ; 

"Fancy  Filette,"  his  wife  broke  in,  "a  painting, 
flirting,  immoral  .  .  .  !"  Jerry  scraped  his  chair  back 
along  the  floor  to  cover  the  word,  but  I  knew  where 
I  was  in  a  twinkling. 

"Fancy  Filette!    She'll  play  it  in  short  skirts!" 

"I'll  be  lucky  if  she  doesn't  insist  on  a  song  and 
dance." 

"He  doesn't  need  to  have  her  unless  he  wants  to." 
Mrs.  McDermott  was  positive  on  that  point.  She 


276  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

was  sitting  with  both  children  on  her  lap.  Chiefly 
in  order  to  keep  up  the  fiction  that  I  didn't  know  she 
had  just  been  having  hysterics,  I  had  cautioned  her 
against  letting  them  climb  over  her,  and  she  promptly 
let  them,  because  the  idea  that  she  was  tending  them 
at  a  risk  to  her  health,  rather  helped  out  with  her  own 
notion  of  herself  as  a  misused  but  devoted  wife  and 
mother. 

Jerry  looked  at  me  over  her  head  in  a  mute  appeal 
to  me  to  understand. 

"Unless  Moresco  puts  on  my  play  there  is  no 
chance  for  it,"  he  protested.  "I've  been  to  the 
others.  I'll  tell  you,  though,  if  you  go  to  him  just  as 
you  are,  he  may  think  better  of  it.  He  can't  possi 
bly  get  anybody  so  good." 

We  neither  of  us  believed  that  Mr.  Moresco  would 
turn  down  Fancy  Filette  for  anybody,  but  we  kept 
up  the  game  of  thinking  so  from  sheer  desperation. 
I  played  too  at  the  pretence  that  Jerry's  wife  was  a 
delicate,  idealized  sort  of  creature  who  did  not  under 
stand  the  great  hard  world.  That  was  no  doubt 
what  had  appealed  to  him  in  the  beginning,  but  she 
wasn't  made  up  for  the  part.  She  had  begun  to  put 
on  weight  after  she  had  children,  and  her  hair  wanted 
washing.  I  got  away  as  soon  as  I  could  and  went 
straight  to  Sarah. 

"They'd  been  having  some  kind  of  a  row,"  I  told 
her. 

"Oh,  it  must  have  been  Fancy  Filette  who  set  her 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  277 

off,"  Sarah  was  certain.  "She  took  to  you  as  a 
relief,  but  you'll  be  in  for  it  too  if  you  get  the 
part." 

I  had  to  admit  to  myself  after  I  had  been  to  Mr. 
Moresco,  that  there  was  not  much  likelihood  that  I 
would  get  it.  He  laid  the  tips  of  his  pudgy  fingers 
together  and  addressed  me  with  the  slight  blur  in  his 
speech  which  convinced  one  of  the  racial  affinity 
which  he  commonly  denied. 

"Mr.  McDermott  thinks  it  will  suit  me  admi 
rably,"  I  told  him. 

"Ah,  yes,  the  author,"  the  manager  mentioned 
him  as  though  it  were  a  fact  indulgently  admitted  to 
the  discussion,  "but  then,  my  dear  Miss  Lattimore, 
we  have  to  think  of  the  audience. " 

There  was  this  peculiarity  of  Moresco 's  handling 
of  an  audience,  that  he  treated  it  as  an  entity,  a  sort 
of  human  stratification  of  which  the  three  front 
rows  were  lubricious,  the  body  of  the  orchestra  high 
brow,  the  first  balcony  sentimental  and  virtuous, 
the  gallery  facetious.  As  far  as  possible  he  arranged 
his  plays  to  meet  the  requirements. 

"Now  we  have  Miss  Croyden  for  Bettina,  she  is 
your  type." —  He  meant  as  a  woman,  not  as  an  artist; 
Sarah  and  I  were  both  serious  and  respectable. — 
"For  Mrs.  Brandis  I  think  we  should  have  something 
a  little  more  snappy. " 

"It  isn't  written  snappy  in  the  play,"  I  reminded 
him. 


278  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Ah,  no,  that  is  the  trouble;  I  have  spoken  to  Mr. 
McDermott;  he  will  perhaps  change  it." 

"And  if  he  doesn't  you  will  keep  me  in  mind  for  it." 
I  kept  my  voice  with  difficulty  from  being  urgent. 
"You  see,  I  don't  feel  like  playing  a  heavy  part  this 
year."  I  glanced  down  at  my  mourning;  I  hoped 
he  would  accept  it  as  an  explanation.  Two  or 
three  days  later  I  saw  Sarah  and  she  remarked  that 
Jerry  was  rewriting  some  parts  of  his  play  at  the 
request  of  the  manager. 

"The  part  of  Mrs.  Brandis?"    Sarah  nodded. 

"Mr.  Moresco  want's  it  more  —  more " 

"Snappy,"  I  supplied.  "And  who  is  to  have  it, 
have  you  heard?" 

"Fancy  Filette!" 

"Oh,  well,  she's  snappy  enough,  I  suppose." 

"I  know;  I  don't  even  like  to  be  billed  with  her; 
but,  anyway,  the  part  wasn't  worthy  of  you. "  But 
I  felt  as  I  went  home  to  my  lodging  that  that  was 
only  Sarah's  kind  way  of  putting  it. 


CHAPTER  H 

I  SAW  more  than  a  little  of  Jerry  McDermott  during 
the  spring  and  summer  that  I  stayed  in  Chicago, 
haunting  managers'  offices  in  my  winter's  suit  and 
a  fixed  determination  not  to  let  any  of  them  suspect 
that  I  knew  I  couldn't,  for  the  moment,  act  at  all. 
Where  the  gift  had  gone  I  did  not  know,  nor  when, 
in  some  desperate  encounter  with  the  chance  of  an 
engagement,  I  attempted  to  draw  about  me  the 
tattered  remnants  of  my  old  facility,  had  I  any  notion 
what  would  bring  it  back  again. 

Effie  wrote  me  to  come  home  for  the  hot  weather, 
but  though  I  regretted  afterward  not  having  done  so 
I  could  not  make  up  my  mind  to  leave  Chicago.  It 
seemed  to  me  then  that  the  deadly  quality  of  Taylor- 
ville  lay  waiting  like  a  trap,  which  in  my  present  be 
numbed  condition  might  close  on  me  if  I  put  myself 
in  the  way  of  it.  I  thought  that  if  I  got  out  of  reach 
of  the  flare  of  light  from  the  theatre  doors,  of  the 
smell  of  back  scenes  and  the  florid  grip  of  the  posters, 
that  I  should  never  in  this  world  win  back  to  them. 
A  summer  in  Taylorville  would  have  saved  me 
money,  would  have  rested  and  perhaps  restored  the 
balance  of  my  powers,  but  the  inward  monitor  of 
which  I  was  the  mere  shell  and  surface,  clutched  upon 

279 


280  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  city  with  the  grip  of  desperation.  I  hung  upon 
whatever  slight  attachments  to  the  theatre  my  cir 
cumstances  afforded,  like  the  drowned  upon  a  rope, 
and  waited  for  the  resuscitating  touch.  Somewhere 
beyond  me  I  was  aware  of  succour;  not  knowing  from 
whence  it  should  come,  I  grasped  at  everything  within 
reach  and  was  buffeted  and  torn  about  hi  the  eddy  of 
reverses. 

What  more  even  than  his  need  of  me,  drove  me 
back  on  Gerald  McDermott,  was  the  certainty  that 
he  was  deriving  from  Fancy  Filette  the  quality  I 
missed.  She  was  playing  in  one  of  the  cheaper 
theatres  in  one  of  those  entertainments  that  men  are 
supposed  to  resort  to  when  their  families  are  out  of 
town,  and  I  had  a  moment's  feeling  that  he  exposed 
his  sex  to  ridicule  by  the  avidity  with  which  he  sur 
rendered  himself  to  her  perfectly  obvious  methods. 
Until  he  sent  his  family  north  to  one  of  the  lake 
resorts  for  the  hot  weather,  I  found  myself  involved 
in  certain  obligations  of  visiting  at  his  house,  where 
I  saw  that  his  wife  created  for  him  by  her  incom 
petence  much  the  same  sort  of  background  that  my 
bereaved  and  purse-pinched  condition  made  for  me, 
and  watched  with  alternate  sympathy  and  resent 
ment  his  flight  from  it  to  the  effective  self-complac 
ency  which  Miss  Filette  induced  in  him. 

I  don't  mean  that  Jerry  wasn't  fond  of  his  wife 
in  a  way,  and  faithful  to  her,  in  so  far  as  she  didn't 
interfere  with  his  male  prerogative  of  being  played 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  281 

upon  by  other  women,  but  I  do  not  think  he  had 
ever  an  inkling  that  the  vortex  of  anger  and  despair 
which  she  forced  him  to  share  with  her,  in  lieu  of  the 
passion  which  she  couldn't  any  more  excite,  was  of 
the  same  stripe  as  his  need  of  the  high,  inflated  mood 
that  Miss  Filette  provided  for  him  with  her  little  bag 
of  tricks.  For  from  the  first  Jerry  seized  on  me, 
poured  himself  out,  despoiled  himself  of  all  the  hopes, 
conjectures,  half -guesses  of  his  career,  and  that  with 
out  in  the  least  discovering  that  I  was  hi  need  of 
much  the  same  sort  of  relief  myself.  After  his  wife 
had  taken  the  children  to  the  country  —  though  she 
used  even  then  to  come  down  on  him  suddenly  with 
both  of  them  and  break  up  his  work  for  days,  or 
just  when  it  was  running  smoothly,  wire  to  him  to 
rush  up  to  Lake  View  and  allay  the  horrors  of  her 
too  active  imagination  —  often  evenings  after  the 
day's  work,  he  would  take  me  to  dine  at  queer  little 
French  or  Italian  restaurants  which  were  supposed 
to  be  preferred  on  account  of  the  "atmosphere" 
rather  than  their  cheapness,  and  uncoil  for  me  there 
all  the  intricate  turnings  of  his  work  upon  itself,  and 
the  rich  shapes  and  colours  it  took,  played  upon  by 
the  slanting  eyes  and  carmine  smile  of  Miss  Filette. 
He  would  sit  opposite  me  with  a  cigarette  and  a 
glass  of  "Dago  red,"  his  black,  shining  hair,  which 
he  wore  too  long,  slanting  above  his  forehead  like 
a  boding  wing,  uncramping  his  soul;  and  though  I 
liked  him  as  a  friend,  and  as  a  playwright  thought 


282  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

him  immensely  worth  while,  I  was  divided  between 
exasperation  at  his  tacit  exclusion  of  me  from  the 
world  of  excited  powers  in  which  any  stimulation  of 
his  maleness  threw  him,  and  fear  that  in  missing 
his  capacity  for  quick,  shallow  passions,  I  had 
missed  the  one  indispensable  thing  for  my  art. 

"It  is  the  chance  of  a  lifetime,"  Jerry  would  be 
reassuring  me,  "to  delineate  a  character  that  will  be 
so  intimate  an  expression  of  the  one  who  is  to  play 
it  ...  it's  really  extraordinary  that  she  should  have 
been  named  Fancy  .  .  .  it's  symbolic." 

"Oh,  if  you  imagine  she  is  really  in  the  least  like 
the  Mrs.  Brandis  you  are  creating  .  .  .  besides,  I 
happen  to  know  her  name  is  Powers,  Amanda 
Powers. "  He  caught  at  this  delightedly. 

"Ah,  she's  a  poet,  a  poet!  Such  self-knowledge! 
To  think  of  her  knowing  what  would  suit  her  so 
exactly!" 

But  I  was  not  in  the  least  interested  in  Miss 
Filette's  psychology.  What  I  was  trying  to  get  at 
was  the  source  of  the  creative  mood  which  I  was 
sensible  did  not  arise  from  anything  Miss  Filette 
was,  but  from  what  Jerry  was  able  to  think  of  her. 
I  admitted  it  was  a  mood  you  had  to  be  helped  to, 
but  I  wasn't  going  to  accept  it  from  any  male  com 
pliment  to  his  inamorata.  I  set  up  Jerry's  case 
alongside  of  Miss  Dean  and  Manager  O'Farrell,  and 
a  kind  of  fine  intolerance  drove  me  from  it  as  ships 
are  driven  apart  upon  the  tide. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  283 

It  drove  me  back  in  the  first  instance  upon  what 
Pauline  and  Henry  Mills  stood  for  in  my  life.  I  was 
full  of  a  formless  importunate  capacity,  like  the 
motor  impulses  of  a  paralytic,  and  I  imagined  a  relief 
from  it  in  the  shadow  of  some  succoring  male  who,  by 
assuming  the  traditional  responsibility  of  getting 
a  living,  should  leave  me  free  to  produce  the  perfect 
flower  of  Art.  At  the  time  I  was  as  far  from  realiz 
ing  as  Pauline,  that  she  was  eminently  the  sort  of 
woman  the  sheltered  life  produced;  had  Henry 
Mills  been  upon  the  market  I  should  have  seized 
upon  him  promptly  as  the  solution  of  all  my  diffi 
culties. 

Pauline  did  her  best  for  me  —  that  is  to  say,  she 
brought  out  for  me  an  infinite  variety  and  arrange 
ment  of  the  sentimentalized  sex  attractions  with 
which  she  charmed  dull  care  from  Henry's  brow. 
It  was  only  by  degrees  that  I  perceived  that  the 
utter  want  of  relativity  of  the  quality  that  was  known 
in  Evanston  as  True  Womanliness,  was  due  to  its 
being  conditioned  very  much  as  I  thought  of  myself 
as  happiest  to  be.  It  was  not  until  Pauline  went  to 
the  country  for  the  hot  weather  without  making  any 
sensible  change  in  my  affairs,  that  I  began  to  under 
stand  how  little  she  contributed.  Wfhat  I  chiefly 
missed  was  a  place  to  walk  to  when  I  went  out  for 
exercise. 

I  spent  a  great  deal  of  time  just  walking,  for  there 
was  not  much  doing  in  the  theatrical  line  to  interest 


284  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

me,  and  I  was  sustained  and  tormented  by  intima 
tions  that  somewhere,  not  far  from  me,  my  Help 
walked  too.  I  don't  know  where  this  conviction 
came  from  that  there  was  help  somewhere  in  the 
world;  but  by  the  middle  of  the  summer  the  ter 
rible,  keen  need  of  it  walked  with  me  through  all 
my  days  and  lay  down  with  me  at  night.  There 
were  times  when  the  certainty  that  it  was  there 
seemed  almost  enough  to  lift  me  again  to  a  plane 
of  power,  other  times  when  the  sheer  hunger  of 
it  bit  into  the  bone.  It  was  most  like  the  sense  I  had 
had  as  a  child  of  the  large  friendliness  that  brooded 
over  Hadley's  pasture;  it  was  like  the  promise  of  the 
shining  destiny  that  had  moved  between  my  youth 
and  the  common  occurrence;  but  now  at  times,  just 
along  the  edge  of  sleep,  or  out  of  the  thick,  waking 
drowse  of  heat,  it  shaped  familiarly  human.  I  think 
about  that  time  I  must  have  dreamed  again  the 
dream  I  had  of  Helmeth  Garrett  just  after  I  had  seen 
Modjeska,  writing  that  letter  in  his  uncle's  house; 
and  with  the  help  of  what  my  mother  had  told  me  I 
was  able  to  read  it  plain.  I  do  not  distinctly  remem 
ber  dreaming  this,  but  there  were  times  when,  just 
after  waking,  my  mind  would  be  full  of  him,  and  there 
would  be  a  stir  in  me  of  the  wings  of  power.  But  in 
the  broad  day,  though  I  thought  of  him  often,  I 
could  not  so  much  as  recall  his  face  clearly. 

The  one  thing  that  I  remembered  about  him  was 
that  I  had  pleased  him.     It  was  a  mortifying  cer- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  285 

tainty  that  Jerry's  ready  acceptance  of  me  as  a 
woman  of  whom  his  wife  could  not  possibly  be 
jealous,  had  defined  for  me,  that  I  didn't  in  general 
know  how  to  please  and  interest  men.  They  often 
were  interested  in  me,  but  I  was  never  in  the  least 
conscious  of  what  drew  them  or  caused  them  to  sheer 
away.  I  had  a  suspicion,  doubtless  of  Taylorvillian 
extraction,  that  there  was  a  sort  of  culpability  in 
knowing;  but  it  came  back  to  me  now  almost  with  a 
thrill  that  I  had  known  with  Helmeth  Garrett.  I 
had  been  able,  out  of  all  the  possible  things  which 
might  be  said,  to  choose  the  thing  that  swayed  him. 
I  hadn't  known  ever  for  what  things  my  husband 
loved  me;  but  in  a  brief  hour  with  Helmeth  Garrett 
I  was  conscious  of  much  in  my  manner  to  him 
arising  from  his  conscious  need.  And  I  had  no 
more  than  shaped  this  in  my  mind  than  I  felt  a  faint 
stirring  within  me  as  of  power. 

About  this  time  I  began  to  be  more  aware  of  the 
Something  Without,  toward  which  my  work  tended, 
just  after  I  had  been  asleep,  as  if  the  self  of  me 
had  gone  on  seeking  more  successfully  in  the  silences. 
I  would  arise  very  early  with  such  a  faint  conscious 
ness  as  a  vine  might  have  toward  the  nearest  wall, 
and  get  up  in  the  blue  of  the  morning  to  go  for 
long  walks  through  the  pleasant,  empty  streets, 
sometimes  out  to  the  lake  shore  where  the  glint  of 
the  moving  water  under  the  mist  struck  faint  sparkles 
from  my  stagnant  surfaces.  I  would  come  back  from 


286  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

these  excursions  beginning  to  faint  with  the  day's 
heat,  to  wear  through  the  afternoon  with  books  and 
long  drowses,  and  then  in  the  cool  of  the  evening  It 
would  call  me  again,  and  I  would  seek  It  until  late 
at  night,  sometimes  in  the  lit  streets,  fetid  with  the 
day's  smells,  sometimes  on  a  roof  garden  or  at  a 
park  concert,  where  the  lights,  the  gayety,  and  the 
music  served  merely  as  a  drug  to  my  outer  sense, 
which  went  on  busily  at  its  absorbing  quest.  Some 
times  men  spoke  to  me  in  these  lonely  wanderings; 
I  would  remember  it  afterward  as  one  recalls  little, 
unnoticed  incidents  in  the  midst  of  great  excitement; 
but  for  the  most  part  I  was,  except  for  the  invisible 
presence,  as  unaccompanied  as  if  the  city  had  been 
quite  empty.  If  I  could  have  laid  the  anxiety  of  my 
diminishing  bank  account  and  the  dread  of  not  get 
ting  an  engagement,!  should  have  been  almost  happy. 
It  was  along  early  in  August  that  Chicago  was 
greatly  stirred  by  the  visit  of  one  of  the  Presidential 
candidates  —  for  that  was  a  Presidential  year  — 
who  was  also  a  popular  hero.  It  had  come  rather 
unexpectedly  and  the  preparations  for  it  were  of  the 
hastiest.  There  was  to  be  speaking  at  Armory 
Hall,  and  a  reception  afterward,  and  I  thought 
I  would  go  and  clasp  hands  with  the  great  man, 
as  if,  perhaps,  I  might  find  in  it,  as  many  of  his 
admirers  did,  a  sort  of  king's  touch  for  the  lethargy 
of  my  spirit.  The  meeting  began  early  in  the  sweat 
ing  afternoon  and  dragged  out  three  heavy  hours. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  287 

Nothing  of  any  importance  transpired  there  until  we 
were  moving  up  the  right  side  of  the  hall  toward  the 
receiving  committee.  The  hall  was  split  lengthwise 
by  a  bank  of  chairs,  and  down  the  left  aisle  the 
company  of  those  who  had  already  gripped  the  broad 
palm  of  the  candidate,  had  been  elbowed  to  oblivion 
by  the  committee.  It  was  in  the  very  beginning 
of  the  handshaking  and  there  were  not  so  many  of 
them  as  of  us.  They  lingered  in  groups  and  talked 
with  one  another.  I  was  about  midway  of  the 
aisles  and  several  persons  deep  in  the  crush,  when  I 
saw  him.  How  well  I  knew  the  lock  falling  over  his 
forehead,  and  the  quick  unconscious  motion  of  the 
head  that  tossed  it  back!  There  was  the  inde 
finable  air  of  the  outdoor  man  about  him, 
though  he  was  quite  correctly  dressed  and  had  a 
lady's  light  wrap  over  his  arm. 

"Helmeth!  Helmeth!"  I  cried  out  to  him  from 
the  centre  of  my  will.  I  fought  my  way  to  the  outer 
edge  of  the  moving  crowd,  I  caught  at  chairs  and 
struggled  to  maintain  my  position  opposite  him. 
He  was  talking  to  two  or  three  men,  and  just  at  the 
edge  of  the  group  a  woman  stood  with  an  air  of 
waiting.  I  resented  her  immobility,  so  near  him  and 
so  little  moved  by  him. 

"Helmeth,  Helmeth,  Look!  Look  at  me!"  I 
demanded  voicelessly  across  the  bank  of  chairs. 

He  heard  me;  slowly  he  turned;  his  attention 
wandered  from  the  group. 


288  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Helmeth!  Helmeth!"  All  my  will  was  in  my 
cry.  Now  he  looked  in  my  direction.  There  was 
that  in  his  face  that  told  me  my  cry  had  touched  the 
outer  ring  of  his  consciousness.  Then  the  lady  who 
stood  by,  took  advantage  of  his  detachment  to  touch 
him  on  the  arm.  Only  a  man's  wife  touches  him  like 
that.  I  knew  her  at  once;  she  was  the  type  of 
woman  who  subscribes  to  the  Delineator,  and  belongs 
to  the  church  because  she  thinks  it  is  an  excellent 
thing  for  other  people.  She  had  blond  hair,  dis 
creetly  frizzled  about  the  temples,  and  her  dress  had 
been  made  at  home. 

As  soon  as  she  touched  him,  Helmeth  Garrett 
turned  to  her  with  divided  attention.  I  saw  her 
take  his  arm;  he  looked  back;  the  cry  held  him;  his 
eyes  roved  up  and  down;  the  moving  mass  closed 
between  us  and  carried  me  completely  out  of  sight. 

It  was  fully  a  quarter  of  an  hour  before  the  crowd 
released  me,  and  by  that  time  he  had  quite  vanished. 
I  hung  about  the  entrance  to  the  hall,  I  pushed  here 
and  there  in  the  press,  elbowed  out  of  it  by  resentful 
citizens.  At  last  when  the  hall  was  closed  and  even 
the  policemen  had  gone  from  before  it,  I  went  home, 
to  lie  awake  half  the  night  planning  how  to  get  at 
him.  And  the  moment  I  woke  from  the  doze  of 
exhaustion  into  which  I  finally  fell,  I  knew  that  the 
thread  which  bound  me  to  Chicago  had  snapped. 
I  stayed  on  two  or  three  days,  vaguely  hoping  to 
come  across  him.  I  even  looked  in  the  hotel  regis- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  289 

ters  before  I  accepted  Sarah's  urgent  invitation  to 
spend  the  rest  of  the  month  with  her  at  Lake  View. 

One  night  when  the  wind  out  of  the  lake  was  fresh 
enough  to  suggest,  in  the  closed  window  and  the 
drawn  blind,  a  reciprocated  intimacy,  I  told  Sarah 
all  about  Helmeth  Garrett. 

"And  to  think,"  I  said,  "how  different  it  all  might 
have  been  if  only  I  had  got  that  letter. " 

"Yes,"  Sarah  admitted,  "but  that  doesn't  prove 
you'd  have  been  happy. " 

"Not  if  we  loved  one  another?" 

"Oh,  I  am  not  sure  loving  has  anything  to  do  with 
happiness,  or  is  meant  to.  Sometimes  I  think  God 
—  or  whoever  it  is  manages  things  —  has  a  very 
poor  opinion  of  happiness,  because  you  don't  find  it 
invariably  along  with  the  best  of  experiences.  It 
happens,  or  it  doesn't.  If  love  does  anything  for 
you  it  is  just  to  give  you  the  use  of  yourself. " 

"But  it  hasn't/'  I  protested;  "I'm  just  stump 
ing  along." 

"You  haven't  really  had  it  —  just  being  kissed 
once,  what  does  that  amount  to?" 

"Oh,  Sarah,  Sarah,  that  is  what  hurts  me!  I 
haven't  really  had  it.  I'm  never  going  to.  I'll 
just  go  halting  like*  this  all  my  life." 

"No,  you  won't,"  Sarah  shook  her  head,  piecing 
her  own  knowledge  slowly  into  comfort  for  me. 
"You  remember  what  I  told  you  that  time  when  you 
found  out  about  Dean  and  Mr.  O'Farrell?  There's 


290  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

a  kind  of  feeling  that  goes  with  acting  that  is  like 
loving,  only  it  isn't.  I  don't  know  where  it  comes 
from.  Maybe  it  is  what  they  call  genius,  but  1 
know  you  can  slide  off  from  loving  into  it.  That  is 
what  makes  Jerry  think  he  has  to  be  in  love  all  the 
time;  it  is  a  little  stair  he  climbs  up,  and  then  he  goes 
sailing  off.  You  don't  think  Fancy  Filette  really 
does  anything  for  him?" 

"Goodness,  no;  she  hasn't  a  teaspoonful  of 
brains!" 

"Well,  then,"  she  triumphed.  "After  a  while  his 
genius  will  be  so  strong  in  him  that  he  won't  need 
that  sort  of  thing  and  he  will  think  it  ridiculous. " 

"And  you  think  that  will  come  to  me?" 

"It  did  come.  You  didn't  have  to  be  in  love  to 
begin,"  Sarah  objected. 

"  Sarah,  I  will  tell  you  the  truth !  I  was  in  love  all 
the  time,  I  didn't  know  with  whom,  but  always 
wanting  somebody  .  .  .  trying  to  get  through  to  some 
thing;  trying  to  mate.  That  was  it.  Nights  when 
I  would  do  my  best,  and  the  house  would  be  storming 
and  cheering,  I  would  look  around  for  ...  for  some 
body.  And  I  would  go  to  my  room,  and  he  wouldn't 
be  there!  I  used  to  think  Tommy  would  be  He, 
I  wanted  him  to  be.  I  thought  some  day  I  would 
turn  around  suddenly  and  find  him  changed  into  .  .  . 
whatever  it  was  I  wanted.  But  I  know  now  he  never 
could  have  been  that.  And  all  this  summer  .  .  .  I've 
heard  it  calling.  I've  walked  and  walked.  Some- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  291 

times  it  was  just  around  the  corner,  but  I  never 
caught  up  with  it.  And  when  I  saw  Helmeth 
Garrett,  I  knew!" 

I  had  leaned  back  out  of  the  circle  of  our  small 
shaded  lamp  to  make  my  confession,  but  Sarah 
came  forward  into  it  the  better  to  show  me  the  con 
doning  tenderness  of  her  smile. 

"It's  no  use,  Sarah,  I'm  no  genius;  I  have  to  be  in 
love  like  the  rest  of  them.'*  She  shook  her  head 
gently. 

"You'll  get  across.  Love  would  help;  I  wish  you 
had  it.  But  I'll  confess  to  you;  I  had  love  and  it 
only  opened  the  door.  There's  something  beyond, 
bigger  than  all  men.  You  must  reach  out  and  lay 
hold  of  it.  Oh,  if  it  were  love  one  needed,  I  should 
die  —  I  should  die!"  I  had  never  seen  her  so 
moved  before. 

"Tell  me,  Sarah;  I've  always  wanted  to  know." 

"I  want  you  to  know/ but  it  isn't  easy!  I  didn't 
know  anything  about  love  .  .  .  how  could  I  the  way  I 
was  brought  up!  My  father  was  a  Baptist  preacher. 
I  had  been  taught  that  it  was  wrong  to  let  anybody 
.  .  .  touch  you;  and  when  he  kissed  me  I  felt  as  if  he 
had  the  right 

"I  know,  I  know!"  I  had  been  kissed  that  way 
myself. 

"  How  can  anybody  know?  I  loved  him,  and  I 
was  only  one  of  many.  He  left  me  without  a  word, 
.  .  .  like  a  woman  of  the  street  .  .  .  not  looking  back- 


292  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

ward. "  She  got  up  and  moved  about  the  room,  the 
thick  coil  of  her  rich  brown  hair  slipping  to  her 
shoulders,  and  her  bodily  perfection  under  the  thin 
dressing  gown  distracting  me  even  from  the  passion  of 
her  speech.  I  had  a  momentary  pang  of  sympathy 
with  the  delinquent  Lawrence,  I  could  see  how  a 
man  might  be  afraid  almost,  of  the  quality  of  her 
beauty. 

"Sometimes,"  she  said,  "I  think  marriage  is  a 
much  more  real  relation  than  people  think  —  that 
something  real  but  invisible  happens  between  them 
so  that  even  if  they  are  parted  they  are  never  quite 
the  same  again.  It  is  like  having  a  limb  torn  from 
you;  you  ache  always,  in  the  part  you  have  lost." 
I  knew  something  of  what  that  ache  could  be,  but  I 
could  only  turn  my  face  up  to  hers  that  she  might 
see  my  tears. 

"You  have  enough  of  your  own  to  bear,"  she  said. 
"I  must  not  lay  my  troubles  on  you;  but  I  wanted  to 
tell  you  how  I  know  it  is  not  love  that  makes  art.  I 
was  dying  for  love  when  Mr.  OTarrell  put  me 
to  acting.  I  was  bleeding  so  ...  and  suddenly  I 
reached  out  and  laid  hold  of  Whatever  is,  and  I 
found  I  could  act.  It  was  as  if  the  half  of  me  that 
had  been  torn  away  had  been  between  me  and  It, 
and  I  laid  hold  of  It.  That's  how  I  know."  She 
came  behind  me,  leaning  on  my  chair,  and  I  put  up 
my  hands  to  her. 

"Oh,  Sarah,  Sarah,  help  me  to  lay  hold  of  it,  too!" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  293 

But  for  all  her  shy  confidences,  deep  within  I  didn't 
believe  her. 

Toward  the  first  of  September  we  went  back  to  the 
city,  Sarah  to  begin  rehearsals  for  The  Futurist, 
and  I  to  take  up  the  dreary  round  of  manager's  offices 
and  dramatic  agencies.  The  best  that  was  offered 
me  was  poor  enough,  but  it  had  a  faint  savour  of  a 
superior  motive  clinging  to  it.  It  was  from  a  Mr. 
Coleman,  an  actor  manager  of  the  old,  heavy-jowled 
Shakespearian  type,  who  was  projecting  a  classic 
revival  with  himself  in  all  the  tragic  parts,  and  I 
signed  with  him  to  play  Portia,  Cleopatra,  and  the 
wife  of  Brutus.  We  had  been  busy  with  rehearsals 
about  ten  days  when  I  had  a  telegram  from  Forester 
saying  that  mother  had  died  that  day  and  I  was  to 
come  immediately. 

It  was  late  Sunday  evening  when  I  received  it  and 
I  hunted  up  the  manager  at  the  hotel. 

"I'm  going,"  I  told  him. 

"Well,  of  course,  your  contract " 

"I'm  going  anyway  .  .  .  and  I  know  the  lines." 
He  was  as  considerate,  I  suppose,  as  could  be  ex 
pected. 

"I  can  give  you  three  days,"  he  calculated. 

"Four,  "I  stipulated. 

"Well,  four,"  he  grudged.  That  would  allow 
two  days  for  the  funeral. 


CHAPTER  III 

As  IT  turned  out  I  was  more  than  a  month  in  Taylor- 
ville  and  so  saved  myself  from  the  Coleman  players 
for  a  more  kindly  destiny,  though  at  the  time  it  did 
not  appear  so.  It  grew  out  of  my  realizing,  in  Effie's 
first  clasp  of  me,  something  more  than  our  common 
loss,  more  than  family,  something  that  I  felt  myself 
answer  to  before  we  could  have  any  talk  together  that 
did  not  relate  to  the  funeral  and  the  manner  of  my 
mother's  death. 

They  thought  from  little  things  that  came  to  mind 
afterward,  that  she  must  have  been  prepared  for  it, 
but  forebore  to  trouble  them  with  a  presentiment 
of  what  could  not  in  any  case  have  been  much  longer 
delayed:  she  had  clung  to  them  more  and  been  still 
more  loath  to  trouble  them  with  her  wants.  The 
Saturday  before,  she  had  made  Effie  understand  that 
she  wished  all  the  photographs  of  my  father  brought 
together,  queer,  little  old  daguerrotypes  of  him  as  a 
young  man,  a  tintype  of  him  in  his  volunteer  soldier 
dress,  and  a  large,  faded  photo  of  him  as  an  officer 
leaning  on  his  sword.  She  kept  them  by  her  and 
would  be  seen  poring  upon  them,  as  though  she  tried 
to  fix  the  identity  of  one  about  to  be  met  under  un 
familiar  or  confusing  circumstances,  though  they  did 

294 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  295 

not  think  of  this  until  afterward.  The  Sunday  of  her 
death  Cousin  Judd  had  come  in  to  sit  with  her,  as  his 
custom  was,  an  hour  earlier  than  the  morning  ser 
vice.  He  had  read  the  day's  lesson  from  the  Bible 
and  sung  the  hymn,  and  then  after  an  interval  Effie, 
who  was  busy  about  the  back  of  the  house,  heard 
him  sing  again  my  mother's  favourite  hymn, 

'*  Come,  Thou  fount  of  every  blessing, 
Tune  my  heart  to  sing  Thy  praise." 

and  as  he  sung  she  saw  the  tears  rolling  down  his  face* 
So  she  turned  her  back  on  them  and  let  them  say 
their  good-byes  without  her,  though  she  had  no 
notion  how  near  the  final  parting  was^ 

Forester  was  dressing  —  he  and  Effie  had  taken 
turns  at  church-going  ever  since  mother's  stroke  — 
and  he  was  surprised  to  find  that  Cousin  Judd  had 
gone  off  without  him.  Mother  clung  to  him  when 
he  went  to  kiss  her  good-bye;  she  struggled  with  her 
impotence,  but  they  made  out  that  it  was  not  be 
cause  she  wanted  him  to  stay  at  home  with  her;  and 
for  the  first  time  since  her  illness  she  wished  not  to 
be  propped  up  at  the  window  where  she  could  sign 
to  the  neighbours  going  by,  but  seemed  to  want 
greatly  to  sleep.  Effie  wheeled  her  into  the  corner 
of  the  sitting  room;  and  a  little  later  she  noticed  that 
mother's  head  had  slipped  down  on  the  pillow  as  it 
did  sometimes,  past  her  power  to  lift  it  up  again. 


296  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

So  my  sister  straightened  the  poor  head  with  a  kiss 
and  went  back  to  getting  the  dinner.  She  moved 
softly  because  mother  seemed  asleep,  but  at  last 
when  she  went  as  usual  to  tell  her  that  Forester  was 
visible  at  the  end  of  the  street,  on  the  way  home,  she 
saw  that  the  head  had  slipped  down  again,  and  this 
time  as  she  lifted  it  up  there  was  no  life  in  it  at  all. 

One  of  the  strange  incidents  of  that  morning,  and 
yet  not  strange  when  you  think  how  much  they  had 
been  to  one  another,  was  that  Cousin  Judd,  though 
he  had  started  home  directly  after  church,  could 
not  get  there,  but  when  he  had  driven  a  little  way 
out  of  town,  drawn  by  he  knew  not  what  unseen 
force,  turned  back  and  pulled  up  in  front  of  our  door 
just  as  the  doctor  who  had  been  summoned  hastily 
was  saying  that  mother  had  been  dead  an  hour. 

It  was  Monday  morning  when  I  arrived,  and  the 
funeral  could  not  be  until  Tuesday,  to  allow  time 
for  the  news  to  penetrate  to  all  the  distant  country 
places  from  which  my  mother's  relatives  would  be 
drawn  to  it,  moved  and  anxious  to  come,  though 
many  of  them  had  not  seen  her  for  a  matter  of  years. 
I  think  I  realized  at  once  how  it  would  be  about  my 
getting  back  to  Chicago,  especially  when  I  spoke  to 
Effie  about  it.  She  cried  out  and  clung  to  me  in  a 
way  that  made  me  see  that  I  stood  for  something 
more  to  her  than  just  sisterliness.  Without  saying 
anything  I  wrote  to  Mr.  Coleman  that  I  should  be 
detained  a  week  or  longer,  and  that  though  I  hoped 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  297 

he  would  be  able  to  save  my  place  for  me,  I  didn't 
really  expect  that  he  would. 

It  was  not  in  the  Taylorville  cemetery  that  we 
buried  my  mother,  but  in  a  little  plot  set  aside  from 
the  old  Judd  place,  along  with  the  rest  of  the  Wilsons, 
Judds,  and  Jewetts,  those  who  had  dropped  back 
peacefully  to  their  native  sod,  and  those  sent  home 
from  Gettysburg  and  Appomattox.  It  was  a  longish 
ride;  from  turn  to  turn  of  the  country  road,  teams 
dropped  into  the  procession  that  led  out  from  town. 
On  either  side  the  woods  blazed  like  the  ranked 
Cherubim,  host  on  host;  great  shoals  of  fiery  leaves 
lay  in  the  shallows  of  the  burying  ground.  At  the 
last,  shaken  by  the  light  breeze  that  sprung  up,  little 
flamy  darts  from  the  oak  whirled  into  the  grave  with 
her.  They  were  to  say  in  their  own  fashion  that 
there  was  nothing  more  natural.  I  think  my  mother 
must  have  found  it  so. 

We  had  scarcely  got  home  again,  still  sitting 
about,  veiled  and  voluminous,  when  I  was  drawn  out 
of  grief  to  meet  Effie's  emergency.  It  was  Almira 
Jewett  who  brought  me  face  to  face  with  it.  Al 
mira  had  taken  off  her  things  and  was  getting  tea 
for  us  in  her  brisk,  capable  way. 

"Anyhow,"  she  said,  "I  'spose  you'll  stay  with 
your  sister  until  she  gets  sort  of  used  to  things." 
It  flashed  on  me  that  what  she  was  expected  to  get 
used  to,  was  going  on  just  as  she  had  been  without 
the  excuse  of  my  mother's  needing  her. 


298  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Oh,  I'll  stay  till  the  breaking  up,"  I  met  her 
promptly. 

"My  land!"  said  Almira  Jewett,  "you  talking  of 
the  breakin'  up  and  your  mother  ain't  hardly  out 
of  the  house  yet.  They  do  say  there's  nothing  like 
play-acting  to  make  you  nimble  in  your  feelings." 
I  knew  of  course  that  they  would  lay  it  to  the  defib- 
ricating  influence  of  my  profession  that  I  should  take 
the  breaking  up  of  my  mother's  home  so  lightly, 
but  I  had  caught  a  brief  hiatus  in  Effie's  sobs  and 
I  realized  that  what  the  poor  child  was  afraid  of, 
was  being  hypnotized  into  a  situation  against  which 
her  natural  good  sense  revolted.  I  was  bracing  my 
self  against  the  tradition  of  filial  obligation  that  I 
felt  was  going  to  be  put  in  force  against  me,  when 
suddenly  help  arrived  from  an  unsuspected  quarter. 

"I  'spose  you're  going  with  a  troupe  yet?"  Cousin 
Lydia  interposed,  for  the  first  time  in  her  life,  I  be 
lieve,  delivering  herself  of  a  conclusion.  "It's  a  pity, 
because  if  you  was  anyways  settled  you  could  take 
Effie  with  you.  Forester  was  a  good  son;"  she 
ruminated  on  that  for  a  while.  "He  was  what  you 
call  a  real  model  son,  but  I  don't  know  as  I  want  to 
see  Effie  married  to  him  the  same  as  your  mother 
was."  It  gave  me  a  shock  to  think  that  all  these 
years  she  must  have  been  seeing  how  things  were. 

"She  shan't,"  I  assured  her,  "not  if  I  have  to  stay 
with  Forrie  myself."  I  had  thought  a  good  many 
times  what  was  to  become  of  Effie.  I  couldn't  take 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  299 

her  with  me,  of  course,  but  I  wasn't  in  the  least  pre 
pared  to  see  her  intrigued  by  the  popular  sentiment 
into  becoming  a  mere  figurehead  for  Forester's  role  of 
provider.  "Keeping  up  a  home"  they  called  it  in 
Taylorville,  as  though  the  house  and  furniture  and 
the  daily  habit  of  coming  back  to  it,  were  the  pivotal 
facts  of  existence. 

It  almost  seemed  as  if  it  might  come  to  that. 
After  the  others  were  all  gone  and  the  night  closed 
in  on  us  three,  the  spirit  of  the  dead  came  and  stood 
among  us.  Effie  wept  in  Forrie's  arms  and  said  that 
he  should  not  be  quite  bereft,  he  should  have  her 
anyway. 

"You  poor  child  .  .  .  you've  got  a  brother  left; 
you  too,  Olivia.  You  shan't  want  for  a  home  while  I 
live."  That  of  course  was  the  sort  of  thing  Tay 
lorville  expected  of  him.  It  began  to  seem  as  if  I 
might  have  to  make  good  my  word  about  staying 
with  my  brother  to  let  Effie  free.  I  believe  he  would 
have  accepted  that  without  even  a  suspicion  of 
what  I  surrendered  by  it.  If  anything,  he  would 
have  seen  in  it  only  another  dramatization  of  his  role 
of  dutifulness.  That  a  woman  had  any  preferred 
employment  beside  cushioning  life  for  the  males  of 
her  family,  had  not  impinged  on  the  consciousness 
of  Taylorville. 

But  the  very  next  morning  I  awoke  anew  to  the 
purpose  of  rescuing  Effie,  and  to  the  recollection 
of  an  incident  of  the  funeral,  noted  but  not  taken 


SOO  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

into  the  reckoning  in  the  stress  of  more  absorb 
ing  emotions. 

"Effie,  wasn't  that  Mrs.  Jastrow  I  saw  at  the 
cemetery  yesterday  with  her  head  done  up  in  a  black 
veil  —  crape,  too?  I  have  just  recalled  it."  Effie 
nodded. 

"One  would  have  thought,"  I  resented,  "that  she 
was  one  of  the  family. " 

"Ah,  that's  it;  she  thinks  she  is." 

"One  of  the  family?  Oh!  you  don't  mean  that 
Forrie Where  was  Lily  then?"  I  demanded. 

"She  wouldn't  come,  of  course,  not  being  recog 
nized  as  one  of  the  family  and  yet  counting  herself 


one." 


"But,  explain  .  .  .  how  could  she?  I  thought  that 
was  broken  off  long  ago. " 

"When  mother  was  first  taken,"  Effie  agreed, 
"but  you  see  she  made  such  a  dead  set  at  him,  she 
had  to  keep  it  up  somehow;  she  couldn't  admit  that 
Forrie  hadn't  wanted  her.  So  they  made  it  up 
between  them,  Lily  and  her  mother,  I  mean,  that  she 
and  Forrie  had  really  been  engaged,  but  it  had  been 
broken  off  because  Forrie  couldn't  marry  so  long  as 

mother "  She  broke  off  with  tears  again, 

remembering  how  mother  was  now. 

"That  was  two  years  ago;  you  don't  mean  to  say 
they've  kept  it  up  all  the  time?" 

"They've  had  to.  You  see  Lily  hadn't  been  care 
ful  about  not  getting  herself  talked  about  with 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  301 

Forester.  Oh,  not  scandal,  of  course,  but  you  know 
how  it  is  when  a  girl  is  crazy  after  a  man;  everybody 
gets  to  hear  of  it.  And  then  they  had  to  make  so 
much  of  the  engagement  never  coming  to  anything 
on  mother's  account,  it  quite  spoiled  Lily's  chances, 
and  you  know,  Forester  .  .  .  . " 

"Oh,  he  was  taken  in  by  it,  no  doubt;  it  was  some 
thing  to  sentimentalize  over  and  be  self-sacrificing 
about." 

"Well,  of  course,  he  couldn't  quite  abandon  the 
poor  girl;  and  she  really  is  fond  of  him." 

"And  perfectly  safe  to  philander  with.  Well,  now 
that  he  has  no  one  depending  on  him  I  suppose  he 
will  marry  her!" 

"That's  what  is  worrying  me,"  protested  Effie; 
"you  see  it  all  depends  on  whether  I  go  on  depend 
ing  on  him."  She  broke  down  over  that.  Mother 
hadn't  wanted  Forester  to  marry  Lily  Jastrow,  and 
everybody  by  the  mouth  of  Almira  Jewett,  had 
thought  it  was  Effie's  duty  to  keep  him  from  it  if 
she  could, 

"And  I  could,  by  just  staying  on.  It's  mother's 
money  in  the  business,  your's  and  mine  as  much  as 
his,  and  this  house  .  .  .  it's  partly  ours  ...  if  we 
stay  in  it. " 

"Well  if  you  want  to " 

Effiie  came  over  and  sobbed  on  my  shoulder,  "Oh? 
I  don't, "  she  said.  "  I  suppose  it  is  horrid  and  selfish. 
I'm  fond  of  Forrie,  but  I  want  to  do  things  in  the 


30£  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

world  .  .  .  like  you  have  .  .  .  and  I  want  to  marry 
and  have  babies.  Oh,  oh!"  She  was  quite  over 
whelmed  with  the  turpitude  of  it. 

"You  shall,  you  shall,"  I  determined  for  her. 

"Oh,  Olivia,  I  have  wanted  you  so.  I  knew  you'd 
understand.  It  was  all  right  so  long  as  mother  lived; 
I  could  do  anything  for  her,  but  now  I  want  —  I 
want  to  be  me!"  I  understood  very  well  what  that 
want  was.  But  first  off  I  had  to  explain  to  Effie  why 
I  couldn't  take  her  with  me.  It  was  wonderful  how 
she  entered  into  my  feeling  about  my  work,  and  my 
lack  of  success  in  Chicago. 

"Of  course,  you  ought  to  go  to  New  York.  You'll 
be  a  great  tragic  actress,  Olive,  I  know  that.  You 
could  go,  too,  if  you  could  get  your  share  out  of  the 
business.  You  could  have  mine  and  yours!"  She 
glowed  over  it.  But  the  fact  was  we  couldn't  get 
the  money  out  of  the  business.  As  it  stood  we 
couldn't  have  sold  the  shop  for  what  mother  had  put 
into  it,  and,  besides,  we  should  have  had  to  deal  first 
with  Forester's  conviction  that  he  was  taking  care  of 
our  shares  for  us.  I  needn't  have  worried  about 
Effie;  she  was  too  pretty  and  competent  not  to  have 
arranged  for  herself.  The  principal  and  his  wife 
drove  over  from  Montecito  to  say  that  they  would 
be  glad  to  have  her  come  back  and  finish  the  course 
interrupted  within  a  few  months  of  graduation  by 
my  mother's  illness.  And  for  her  board  and  tuition 
she  was  to  act  as  "the  principal's  secretary.  Within 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  303 

a  year  she  wrote  that  she  was  engaged  to  their 
son. 

In  the  meantime  I  undertook  to  stop  the  capacious 
maw  of  Forrie's  need  of  being  important;  and  the 
only  way  I  saw  to  do  it,  involved  my  surrender  of 
any  hope  I  had  of  finding  my  own  release  in  what 
my  mother  had  left  us  of  my  father's  hard  won 
savings.  I  shouldn't  have  had  any  compunction,  so 
fierce  was  my  own  need  of  success,  about  forcing  my 
brother's  hand,  but  I  meant  definitely  not  to  leave 
any  gap  in  his  life  for  Effie  to  be  drawn  back  into. 
Before  we  had  come  to  this  point,  the  second  after 
noon  after  the  funeral  in  fact,  circumstances  had 
begun  to  work  for  me.  Effie  and  I,  looking  out  of 
the  window,  saw  Mrs.  Jastrow  coming  along  by  the 
front  fence  with  all  her  gentility  spread,  as  it  were, 
by  the  feeling  she  had  of  her  call  on  us  being  a  diplo 
matic  function. 

"She's  coming  to  see  how  we  take  it,"  Effie  averred. 

"Her  coming  to  the  funeral  as  one  of  the  family? 
Well,  how  do  we  take  it,  Effie?" 

"Mother  couldn't  bear  the  idea  of  it."  Tears 
came  into  my  sister's  eyes;  I  could  see  the  wings  of 
self-immolation  hovering  over  her. 

"Look  here,  Effie,  you  go  and  take  home  Mrs. 
Endsleigh's  spoons."  There  had  been  so  many  out 
of  town  connections  dropping  in  for  a  meal  that  we 
had  been  obliged  to  fall  back  on  our  nearest  neigh 
bour. 


304  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Lily's  respectable,  isn't  she?  and  Forester  has 
encouraged  her.  Well,  you  don't  want  to  spoil  the 
poor  girl's  life,  do  you?" 

"Oh,"  said  Effie,  "oh,  Olivia!"  I  could  see  she 
was  torn  between  compunction  and  admiration  for 
my  way  of  putting  it  on  high  moral  grounds.  I 
heard  her  counting  out  the  spoons  in  the  kitchen  as 
I  went  to  let  Mrs.  Jastrow  in. 

I  think  she  didn't  know  any  more  than  Effie  did, 
what  to  make  of  my  manner  of  receiving  her.  She 
sat  on  the  edge  of  a  chair  and  snivelled  a  little  into  a 
handkerchief  which  was  evidently  her  husband's, 
but  it  was  chiefly,  I  could  see,  because  she  had  come 
prepared  to  snivel  and  couldn't  quickly  adjust  her 
self  to  my  change  of  base. 

"Poor  Lily,"  she  moaned,  "she  thought  such  a  lot 
of  Mr.  Lattimore's  mother;  but  I  tell  her  she  must 
bear  up. " 

"She  must  indeed,"  I  assured  her.  "Forester 
needs  all  the  sympathy  he  can  get  just  now."  I 
could  see  her  peeping  over  the  top  of  her  handker 
chief,  trying  to  guess  what  to  make  of  that;  but  the 
sentimental  was  easy  for  her. 

"That's  what  I  tell  her;  they'll  have  to  comfort 
each  other.  Them  poor  young  things,  they'd  ought 
to  be  together.  But  Lily's  so  sensitive  she  couldn't 
bear  to  put  herself  forward. " 

"I'll  tell  Forrie  you  called,"  I  assured  her. 

Mrs.  Jastrow  fanned  herself  with  her  damp  hand- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  305 

kerchief;  her  poor  little  pretence  broke  quite  down 
under  my  friendliness. 

"He's  got  to  marry  her,"  she  whispered.  "Lily's 
been  talked  about,  and  he's  got  to."  I  could  guess 
suddenly  what  it  meant  to  her  to  have  reached  up  so 
desperately  for  something  better  for  her  daughter 
than  she  had  been  able  to  manage  for  herself,  and  to 
come  so  near  not  getting  it.  I  was  able  to  put  some 
thing  like  sympathy  into  my  voice  when  I  spoke  to 
Forester  at  supper. 

"Mrs.  Jastrow  called  to-day.  She  says  Lily  isn't 
bearing  up  as  she  might.  I  suppose  you  ought  to  go 
and  see  her!' 

Effie's  eyes  grew  round  at  me  over  the  teacups, 
but  after  all  Forrie  didn't  know  what  had  passed 
between  mother  and  me  in  regard  to  Lily.  If  I 
chose  to  take  his  relation  to  her  as  a  matter  of  course, 
he  couldn't  object  to  it.  We  heard  Forrie  in  his 
room  changing  his  collar  before  he  went  back  to  the 
shop  again. 

"He'll  go  to  her  to-night  after  he  closes  up,"  Effie 
told  me.  "It  will  end  with  her  getting  him." 

"So  long  as  he  doesn't  get  you "  But  it  was 

unfair  to  put  ideas  like  that  in  Effie's  head.  "After 
all  it  is  a  very  good  match  for  him  in  some  ways; 
she'll  always  look  up  to  him,  and  that  is  what  Forrie 
needs." 

It  was  natural  to  Effie  to  judge  every  situation  by 
what  it  had  for  those  concerned;  she  wasn't  troubled 


306  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

as  I  was  by  the  pressure  of  an  outside  ideal.  By  the 
end  of  a  month,  when  I  thought  of  going  back  to  the 
city,  it  was  tacitly  understood  that  as  soon  as  con 
venient  Forester  was  to  marry  Lily  Jastrow.  He 
meant,  however,  to  be  fair  with  us  both  about  the 
property;  he  had  given  us  notes  for  our  share,  and 
expected  to  pay  interest.  The  note  wasn't  negoti 
able,  as  I  learned  immediately,  and  the  interest  wasn't 
any  more  than  Effie  would  need  for  her  clothing. 
I  felt  that  the  jaws  of  destiny  which  had  opened  to 
let  Effie  out,  had  closed  on  me  instead.  I  returned 
to  Chicago  early  in  November;  my  place  with  the 
Coleman  players  had  long  been  filled,  and  there  was 
nothing  whatever  to  do. 


CHAPTER  IV 

JERRY'S  play,  which  had  had  its  premier  while  I  was 
away,  was  going  on  successfully.  One  of  the  first 
items  of  news  Sarah  told  me  about  him  was  that  his 
wife  was  expecting  another  child,  undertaken  in  the 
hope  that,  if  she  couldn't  hold  her  husband's  roving 
fancy,  she  could  at  least  fix  his  attention  on  her  situ 
ation.  All  that  she  had  got  out  of  it  so  far,  was 
a  reason  for  staying  at  home,  which  left  Jerry 
the  freer  to  bestow  his  society  where  it  was  most 
acceptable. 

"  Does  she  know  —  Miss  Filette,  I  mean  —  about 
the  child." 

"Not  unless  Jerry  has  told  her  —  which  he'd 
hardly  do."  Sarah  laughed  a  little,  and  that  was 
not  usual  with  her;  she  had  very  little  humour. 
"Fancy  is  so  up  in  the  air  about  the  success  of  the 
play,  she  thinks  she  inspired  it.  I  imagine  they'd 
feel  it  an  indelicacy  of  Mrs.  McDermott  to  have 
intruded  her  condition  on  their  relation.  Of  course 
it  is  understood  that  there's  nothing  really  wrong 
about  it.  .  ." 

"It  is  wrong  if  his  wife  is  made  unhappy  by  it. "  I 
hadn't  Sarah's  reason  for  being  lenient.  "  Somebody 
ought  to  speak  to  Jerry. " 

307 


308  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"You  might  —  he  would  listen  to  you.  It  is  just 
because  there  is  so  little  in  it  that  it  is  so  hard  to 
deal  with." 

I  suppose  I  took  to  interfering  in  the  McDermott's 
affairs  because  I  had  so  little  of  my  own  to  interest 
me.  Besides,  I  was  fond  of  Jerry  and  didn't  see  how 
he  was  to  be  helped  by  getting  his  family  into  a 
muddle. 

"But  after  all,"  Sarah  reminded  me,  "it  is  his  own 
wife  and  his  own  inspiration."  It  wasn't  in  me  to 
tell  her,  even  if  I  had  understood  it  myself  at  the 
time,  that  the  secret  of  my  resentment  was  that  it 
should  be  so  accepted  on  all  sides  that  one  must 
choose  between  them.  I  wanted,  oh,  I  immensely 
wanted,  what  Jerry  was  getting  out  of  his  relation  to 
Miss  Filette,  but  I  wanted  it  free  of  the  implication 
that  my  abandonment  of  my  husband  to  the  village 
dressmaker  put  me  in  anything  like  the  same  case. 

"The  real  trouble  with  you,"  Jerry  told  me,  "is 
that  you  are  trying  to  live  in  Chicago  and  Taylor- 
ville  at  the  same  time. " 

Not  being  able  to  make  any  headway  with  him,  I 
went  to  call  on  Miss  Filette.  I  wasn't  on  terms  with 
her  that  would  admit  of  an  assault  on  her  confidence, 
I  didn't  know  her  well  enough  to  call  on  her  in  any 
case,  but  I  wasn't  to  be  thwarted  of  good  intention 
by  anything  so  small  as  a  breech  of  manners  in 
doing  it.  It  wasn't  so  much  the  offense  of  my  under 
taking  it  that  counted,  I  found,  as  Miss  Filette's 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  309 

determination  not  to  hear  anything  that  would 
ruffle  the  surface  of  her  complacency.  I  had  to  drop 
phimb  into  my  revelation  out  of  the  opportunity  she 
made  for  me  in  the  question,  as  to  whether  the  play 
would  or  would  not  go  on  the  road  before  Christmas. 

"I  should  hope  so,"  I  dropped  squarely  on  her; 
"Jerry's  wife  needs  him.  There's  a  child  coming  in 
April." 

"Yes,"  said  Miss  Filette;  she  was  giving  me  tea 
and  she  poised  the  second  lump  over  my  cup  with  an 
inquiring  eyebrow.  "Have  you  seen  what  we  have 
done  with  the  second  act  lately?" 

"Anyway,"  I  said  to  myself  as  I  went,  "she  knows. 
She  can't  skid  over  the  facts  as  she  has  over  my 
telling  her." 

But  it  was  the  certainty  that,  knowing,  she  kept 
right  on  with  Jerry,  that  drove  me  back  on  Pauline 
and  Henry  Mills.  I  fled  to  them  to  be  saved  from 
what,  in  the  only  other  society  I  had  access  to,  fretted 
all  my  finer  instincts;  to  be  ricocheted  by  them 
again  on  to  that  reef  of  moral  squalour  upon  which 
the  artist  and  woman  in  me  were  riven  asunder. 

What  I  should  have  done  was  to  take  my  courage 
in  my  hands  and  have  gone  on  from  Taylorville  to 
New  York.  But  the  most  I  was  equal  to  was  a  fixed 
determination  to  accept  anything  which  would  take 
me  nearer  Broadway,  which,  even  then,  was  to  the 
player  world  all  that  the  lamp  is  to  the  moth.  In 
the  meantime  I  had  settled  in  two  housekeeping 


810  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

rooms  in  a  street  that  I  wouldn't  have  dared  to  give 
to  a  manager  as  an  address;  one  of  those  neighbour 
hoods  where  there  are  always  a  great  many  peram 
bulators,  and  waste  paper  blowing  about.  There 
was  never  anything  for  me,  in  the  frame  of  life  called 
Bohemian,  more  than  a  picturesque  way  of  begging 
the  question  of  poverty.  What  I  looked  for  in  a 
lodging,  was  escape  from  the  bedraggled  profession 
alism  which  went  on  in  what  were  called  studios,  by 
means  of  a  cot  bed,  an  oil  stove,  and  a  few  yards  of 
art  muslin.  That  I  hadn't  managed  it  so  success 
fully  as  I  hoped,  was  made  plain  to  me  a  few  days 
after  I  had  moved  in,  by  the  discovery  of  a  card 
tacked  on  the  opposite  door,  that  read,  "Leon 
Griffin,  the  Variete."  It  was  the  same  theatre  at 
which  Cecelia  Brune  was  playing  the  chief  attrac 
tion  in  song  and  dance.  In  the  glimpses  I  had  of  Mr. 
Griffin  in  the  dark  hall  going  in  and  out,  I  was  aware 
that  he  gave  much  the  same  impression  of  unprof 
itable  use  that  was  associated  in  my  mind  with  the 
Shamrocks. 

All  this  time  I  kept  going  through  the  motions  of 
looking  for  an  engagement.  Now  and  then  some 
shining  bubble  of  opportunity  seemed  to  float  toward 
me,  to  dissolve  in  thin  air  as  soon  as  I  put  my  hand 
out  to  it.  One  of  these  brought  me  to  Cline  and 
Erskine's  waiting  room  on  the  day  that  Cecelia 
Brune  elected  to  register  her  complaint  against 
what  she  considered  a  slight  of  her  turn  at  the  Variete. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  311 

She  flounced  about  more  than  a  little,  not  to  let 
the  rest  of  us  escape  the  inference  that  she  was  not 
used  to  being  kept  waiting.  When  she  had  hooked 
and  unhooked  her  handsome  furs  for  the  fourth  time, 
she  introduced  me  to  Leon  Griffin,  who  except  for  the 
name,  I  shouldn't  have  recognized  for  my  hall  neigh 
bour.  It  was  like  being  slapped  in  the  face  with  my 
own  hard  condition  to  have  him  crowded  on  me  in  that 
character  before  the  whole  roomful.  Life  seemed  so 
to  have  beggared  him.  In  broad  day  he  looked  the 
sort  of  a  man  who  has  failed  to  sustain  himself  in  the 
man's  world,  and  must  reinforce  his  value  with  the 
favour  of  women.  Little  touches  of  effeminacy  about 
his  dress  failed  to  take  the  attention  away  from  its 
shabbiness.  His  hair  had  the  traditional  thespian 
curl  in  spite  of  being  cropped  short,  to  allow  of 
various  make-ups,  one  surmised,  and  his  very  blue 
eyes  were  in  a  perpetual  state  of  extenuating  the 
meagreness  of  his  other  features.  Being  ashamed 
of  my  shame  at  meeting  him  there,  I  began  to  be 
very  nice  to  him.  Cecelia,  in  spite  of  her  magnifi 
cent  raiment,  perhaps  on  account  of  it,  had  been 
disposed  to  graciousness.  She  drew  us  together  with 
a  wave  of  her  hand. 

"She  ought  to  be  doin*  Ophelia  on  Broadway,"  she 
introduced  me  handsomely ;  "  wouldn't  that  get  you ! " 

"I  saw  you  with  the  Hardings  last  year,"  Griffin 
assented,  almost  as  though  I  might  think  it  a  liberty. 
"Where  are  you  playing  now?''  He  had  the  stamp 


312  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

of  too  many  reverses  on  his  face  not  to  estimate  mine 
at  its  proper  worth.  He  had  fine  instincts  too,  for  as 
soon  as  I  told  him  that  I  was  out  of  an  engagement 
that  season,  he  put  himself  on  record  quite  simply. 
"My  turn  goes  off  next  week  —  I'm  trying  to  get 
Cline  to  put  it  on  the  circuit. "  When  we  came  out 
of  the  office  together  he  fell  into  step  with  me.  One 
of  the  young  women  ahead  of  us  made  the  shape  of  a 
bubble  with  her  hands  and  blew  it  from  her.  "Pouff  " 
she  said.  "There  goes  another  of  my  chances." 
She  laughed  with  a  fine  courage. 

"They  all  go  through  with  it,"  Griffin  affirmed. 

"There's  Eversley "  I  have  forgotten  which  of 

the  well-known  incidents  he  related. 

"Eversley  told  me  I  might  come  to  it.  What 
made  you  think  of  him?"  I  demanded. 

"I  saw  his  name  in  the  paper;  he's  to  play  here 
this  winter.  He's  a  wonder." 

"He  said  wonderful  things  to  me  once."  I  had 
just  recalled  them. 

"They'll  come  true  then.  Eversley  never  makes 

a  mistake.  Why,  I  remember  once "  He 

broke  off  as  though  he  had  changed  his  mind  about 
telling  me.  I  was  wondering  if  I  couldn't  get  rid  of 
him  by  stopping  in  at  Sarah's,  when  he  broke  out 
again  suddenly. 

"To  think  of  you  being  out  of  an  engagement  and 
a  girl  like  Cecelia  Brown  —  yes,  I  know  her  name  is 
Brown,  Cissy  Brown  of  Milwaukee " 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  313 

"I've  always  suspected  it,"  I  admitted,  "but  it  is 
her  looks  of  course,  and  the  clothes;  Cecelia  has 
lovely  clothes. " 

"Well,  so  could  you  if  ..."  He  checked  him 
self.  "I  don't  mean  to  say  anything  against  a 
lady  ..." 

"I've  always  suspected  that,  too,"  I  admitted, 
"but  one  doesn't  like  to  say  it." 

"Well,  you  know  what  she  gets  —  thirty-five  a 
week.  A  girl  doesn't  wear  diamond  sunbursts  on 
that." 

"Mr.  Griffin,  I  wish  you'd  tell  me  what  sort  of 
man  it  is  that  gives  diamond  sunbursts  to  Variety 
girls:  I've  never  seen  any  of  them." 

"You  have  probably,  but  you  don't  know  it. 
You  meet  their  wives  in  society. " 

"Henry  Mills."  I  don't  know  what  made  me 
say  it;  the  image  of  him  came  tripping  along  the  sur 
face  of  my  mind  and  slid  off  my  tongue  without  hav 
ing  more  than  momentarily  perched  there. 

"Is  he  in  business  downtown,  and  has  he  got  a 
perfectly  proper  family  and  too  many  dinners  under 
his  vest?" 

"Mr.   Mills's  home  life  is  ideal;  but  I  didn't 


mean 


"Neither  did  I,  but  that's  the  type.  They  mostly 
have  ideal  families,  but  they  couldn't  live  up  to  them 
if  they  didn't  have  Cecelia  Brunes  on  the  side  .  .  . 
I  beg  your  pardon. " 


314  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

He  had  looked  up  and  caught  me  blushing  a  deep, 
painful  red,  but  it  wasn't  on  account  of  what  he  had 
intimated.  I  was  blushing  because  of  the  discovery 
in  myself  of  needs  which,  compared  to  the  ideal  of 
life  I  had  set  for  myself,  were  as  much  of  a  defection 
as  anything  our  conversation  had  suggested  for 
Henry  Mills.  I  was  conscious  in  those  days  of  a 
slow,  steady  seepage  of  all  my  forces  toward  desper 
ation. 

•  "You'll  have  to  take  a  company  out  for  yourself," 
was  Jerry's  solution.  "I'll  write  you  a  play.  I've 
got  a  ripping  idea  —  a  man,  with  a  gift,  and  two 
women,  good  women  both  of  them  —  that's  where  I 
score  against  the  eternal  triangle — each  of  them  trying 
to  save  him  from  the  other  and  breaking  him  between 
them."  Jerry's  plays  were  never  anything  more 
than  dramatizations  of  his  immediate  experience. 
"You  and  Sarah  Croyden,  you  set  each  other  off; 
I'll  write  it  for  both  of  you."  He  walked  up  and 
down  in  my  little  room  with  his  hands  in  his  pockets 
and  his  shining  black  hair  rising  like  quills. 

"Jerry,  how  long  will  it  take  you  to  write  that 
play?"  And  how  much  will  it  cost  to  produce  it?" 

"Ten  thousand  dollars,"  he  answered  to  the  last 
question.  "About  eighteen  months  if  I  go  right  at 
it." 

"And  I've  money  enough  to  last  me  to  the  end  of 
February.  No,"  to  his  swift  generous  gesture. 
"You  have  to  live  eighteen  months  on  yours  —  and 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  315 

another  child  coming. "  I  made  up  my  mind  that  I 
should  have  to  speak  to  Pauline  and  Henry  Mills. 

Greater  than  any  mystery  of  creative  art  to  me, 
is  the  mystery  by  which  the  recipients  of  its  benefits 
manage  to  keep  ignorant  of  its  essential  processes.  I 
have  never  been  able  to  figure  to  myself  how  Pauline 
and  Henry  escaped  knowing  that  the  creative  mood, 
the  keen  hunger  of  which  is  more  importunate  than 
any  need  of  food  or  raiment,  was  to  be  had  for  very 
little  more  than  they  spent  fattening  their  souls  on  its 
choice  products.  For  it  is  always  to  be  bought;  it  is 
the  distinction  of  genius  as  against  talent,  always  to 
know  in  what  far,  unlikely  market  the  precious  com 
modity  is  to  be  bought.  How  was  it  that  Henry 
escaped  knowing  that  the  appealing  femininity  which 
plays  so  large  a  part  in  the  success  of  an  actress  with 
an  audience  of  Millses,  is  largely  the  result  of  having 
been  the  object  of  that  solicitious  protection  which 
it  is  supposed  to  provoke?  With  what,  since  it  was 
agreed  between  Pauline  and  me  that  I  was  not  to 
pay  down  on  that  counter  what  Cecelia  and  Jerry 
parted  with  cheerfully,  was  I  ultimately  to  pay  for  it? 
Now  that  I  had  on  all  sides  of  me  the  witness  of 
desperation,  I  began  to  be  irritated  at  the  way  in 
which,  in  view  of  our  long  friendship,  they  accepted 
it  for  me. 

As  the  holiday  season  approached,  without  any 
change  in  my  circumstances  other  than  a  steady 
diminution  of  my  bank  account,  I  came  to  the  con- 


316  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

elusion  that  the  only  possible  move  was  toward  New 
York  and  that  I  should  have  to  ask  Henry  to  advance 
me  the  money  for  it.  In  view  of  what  came  to  me 
afterward  it  was  a  reasonable  proposition,  but  I 
reckoned  without  that  extraordinary  blankness  to 
the  processes  of  art  which  is  common  to  those  most 
entertained  by  it. 

It  was  a  day  or  two  after  Christmas,  from  which  I 
had  been  excused  by  my  recent  bereavement,  that 
I  went  out  to  dinner  there  with  the  determination  to 
bring  something  to  pass  commensurate  with  their 
usual  attitude  of  high  admiration  for  and  confidence 
in  my  gift.  We  had  gone  into  the  library  after 
dinner,  at  least  it  was  a  room  that  went  by  that  name, 
though  I  don't  know  for  what  reason  except  that 
Henry  smoked  there  and  the  furniture  was  uphol 
stered  in  leather,  as  in  Evanston  it  was  indispensable 
that  all  libraries  should  be. 

Here  and  there  were  touches  that  suggested  that  if 
Henry  moved  his  income  up  a  notch  ortwo,  Pauline's 
taste  might  not  be  able  to  keep  pace  with  it.  Henry 
warmed  his  back  at  the  gas  log  and  wished  to  know 
how  things  went  with  me. 

"As  well  as  I  could  expect  them  here.  I've  made 
up  my  mind  to  try  for  New  York  as  soon  as  I  can 
manage  it. " 

"What's  the  matter  with  Chicago?"  Henry's 
manner  implied  that  whatever  you  believed  about  it, 
you'd  have  to  show  him. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  317 

"Well,  I'd  have  to  be  capitalized  to  do  anything 
here  the  same  as  in  New  York,  and  the  field  there  is 
larger."  I  went  on  to  explain  something  of  what 
the  metropolis  had  to  offer. 

"I  guess  the  worst  thing  about  Chicago  is  that 
you're  out  of  a  job.  People  don't  get  sore  on  a 
place  where  they  are  doing  well." 

"No.  They  generally  light  out  for  a  place  where 
there  are  more  jobs."  I  thought  I  should  get  on 
better  if  I  took  Henry  in  his  own  key,  but  he  forged 
ahead  of  me. 

"If  there's  anything  the  matter  with  your  acting, 
why  don't  you  ask  somebody?" 

"There's  nobody  to  ask.  Besides,  there  isn't 
anything  the  matter  with  it;  the  matter  is  with 


me." 


"Well,  I  must  say  I  don't  see  the  difference." 
"Oh!"  I  cried.  I  hadn't  realized  that  they 
wouldn't  just  take  my  word  for  it.  "It  is  because  I 
am  empty  —  empty!"  I  trailed  off,  seeing  how 
wide  I  was  of  his  understanding.  I  shouldn't  have 
questioned  Henry  Mills's  word  about  the  capitaliza 
tion  of  a  joint  stock  company;  and  I  resented  their 
discounting  my  own  statement  of  my  difficulties. 
Pauline  got  hold  of  my  hand  and  patted  it.  I  won 
dered  if  it  was  because  all  her  own  crises  were  com 
plicated  with  Henry  Mills  that  she  always  thought 
that  affectionateness  was  part  of  the  answer. 

"It  is  only  that,  with  all  your  Gift,  Henry  can't 


318  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

understand  how  you  need  anything  else,"  she 
extenuated. 

"I  need  food  and  clothes,"  I  blurted  out;  "pretty 
soon  I  shall  need  a  lodging." 

"Oh,  my  dear!"  Pauline  was  shocked  at  the 
indelicacy.  I  don't  know  if  she  didn't  understand 
how  poor  I  was,  or  if  it  was  only  the  general  notion  of 
the  sheltered  woman,  to  find  in  complaint  a  kind  of 
heresy  against  the  institution  by  which  she  is 
maintained.  "After  all,"  she  caught  up  with  her 
accustomed  moral  attitude,  "there's  a  kind  of  nobil 
ity  in  suffering  for  your  art.  It's  what  gives  you 
your  spiritual  quality. "  I  thought  I  recognized  the 
phrase  as  one  that  was  current  in  the  women's  clubs 
of  that  period.  I  took  hold  of  my  courage  desper 
ately. 

"Well,  I'm  offering  you  a  chance  to  suffer  two 
thousand  dollars'  worth."  Pauline's  tact  was  proof 
even  against  that. 

"You  Comedy  Child!"  she  laughed  indulgently. 

"You're  getting  ideas,"  Henry  burbled  on  cheer 
fully;  "all  these  long-hairs  and  high-brows  you've 
been  associating  with,  they've  filled  you  up.  That 
friend  of  yours,  McDermott,  somebody  had  him  to 
the  club  the  other  day,  talking  about  the  conserva 
tion  of  Genius.  Nothing  in  it.  Let  them  work  for 
their  money  the  same  as  other  people,  I  say. " 

"You  know  you  didn't  have  any  money  to  begin 
with, "  Pauline  reminded  me.  I  was  made  to  feel  it 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  319 

a  consideration  that  she  hadn't  pressed  the  point  that 
if  I  couldn't  do  again  what  I  had  done  then,  there 
was  something  lacking  in  the  application.  They 
must  have  taken  my  gesture  of  despair  for  sur 
render. 

"I  guess  you  were  just  getting  it  out  of  your  sys 
tem,  "  Henry  surmised  comfortably. 

It  was  not  the  first  nor  the  last  time  that  I  was  to 
come  squarely  up  against  the  lay  conviction  that 
whatever  might  be  known  about  the  processes  of 
art,  it  wasn't  the  artist  that  knew  it.  Later,  when 
Henry  took  me  out  to  the  car,  he  came  round  to 
what  had  been  back  of  the  whole  conversation. 

"I  suppose  you  could  use  more  money  in  your 
business;  most  of  us  could,"  he  advised  me,  "but 
you  don't  want  to  let  people  find  it  out.  There's 
nothing  turns  men  against  a  woman  so  much  as  to 
have  her  always  thinking  about  money.  '* 

It  was  a  very  cold  night  as  I  came  down  the  side 
street  to  my  door,  deserted  as  a  country  road.  The 
narrow  footpath  trodden  in  the  pavement  looked  like 
the  track  of  desolation,  the  cold  flare  of  the  lamps 
was  smothered  in  sodden  splashes  of  snow.  There 
had  been  the  feeling  of  uneasiness  in  the  air  that 
goes  before  a  storm  all  that  forenoon,  and  in  the 
interval  that  I  had  been  revaluing  a  lifelong  friend 
ship  in  terms  of  what  it  wouldn't  do  for  me,  it  had 
settled  down  to  a  heavy  clogging  snow.  I  was 
startled  as  I  turned  in  at  the  entry  to  find  a  man 


320  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

behind  me.  He  had  come  up  unsuspected  in  the  soft 
shuffle  and  turned  in  with  me. 

By  the  light  that  filtered  through  the  weather- 
fogged  transom  I  saw  that  he  was  Griffin  of  the 
Variete.  Now  as  I  fumbled  blindly  at  the  latch  he 
came  close  to  me. 

"Beg  pardon!"  He  had  put  out  his  hand  over 
mine  and  turned  the  key  for  me. 

"My  fingers  are  so  cold,"  I  apologized.  I  turned 
my  face  toward  him  with  the  stiffness  of  cold  and 
tears  upon  it  and  there  was  an  answering  commisera 
tion  in  his  eyes.  I  reached  out  for  the  key  and  he 
took  my  hand  in  his,  holding  it  to  his  breast  with  a 
movement  of  excluding  human  kindness.  If  the 
gesture  was  at  all  theatrical  I  did  not  feel  it.  I  let 
him  hold  it  there  for  a  moment  before  I  went  in  and 
shut  the  door. 


CHAPTER  V 

DEPRESSION,  as  well  as  the  storm  which  held  on 
heavily  all  night  and  the  next  day,  kept  me  close, 
and  the  state  of  my  coal  bin  kept  me  in  bed  most 
of  the  next  day.  Along  late  in  the  afternoon  I  was 
aroused  from  a  lethargy  of  cold  and  crying,  by  Leon 
Griffin  tapping  at  the  door  to  know  how  I  did. 
The  snow  by  this  time  had  settled  down  to  a 
blinding  drift,  and  the  thermometer  had  fallen  into 
an  incalculable  void  of  cold.  Griffin  was  in  his  over 
coat  as  though  he  had  just  come  in  or  was  just 
going  out,  though  I  learned  later  he  had  been  sit 
ting  in  it  all  day  in  his  room.  The  impression  it 
created  of  his  being  in  the  act  of  passing,  led  me  to 
open  my  door  to  him,  as  I  otherwise  might  not 
have  done.  A  terrible,  cold  blast  came  in  with  him 
and  a  clattering  of  the  shutters  on  the  windward 
wall  of  the  house.  Outside,  the  day  was  falling 
dusk;  there  was  no  light  in  the  room  but  the  square 
blank  of  the  window  curtained  by  the  sliding  screen 
of  snow,  and  my  little  stove  which  glowed  like  a 
carbuncle  in  its  corner. 

"You're  cozy  here"  —  he  put  it  as  an  excuse  for 
lingering,  for  I  hadn't  asked  him  to  have  a  chair  — 
hardly  feel  the  wind.     On  my  side  there's  a 

321 


322  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

i 

trail  of  snow  half  across  the  room  where  the  wind 
whips  it  in  between  the  casings." 

Though  he  had  come  ostensibly  to  offer  me  a 
neighbourly  attention,  he  was  plainly  in  need  of  it 
himself;  it  was  his  last  night  at  the  Variete  and, 
between  the  storm  and  the  depression  of  having 
nothing  to  turn  to,  he  was  coming  down  with  a 
cold.  I  had  him  into  my  one  easy  chair  and  sug 
gested  tea. 

"I  hardly  slept  any  last  night,"  he  apologized 
over  his  second  cup,  "the  shutter  clacks  so."  I 
could  hear  it  now  like  the  stroke  of  desolation. 

That  night  when  I  heard  him  stamping  off  the 
snow  in  the  hall,  I  had  a  hot  drink  for  him,  but  when 
I  saw  him,  by  the  rakish  light  of  the  hall  lamp, 
wringing  his  hands  with  the  cold  before  taking  it,  I 
insisted  he  should  come  on  into  my  still  warm  room. 
I  had  to  turn  back  first  to  light  my  own  lamp  and, 
in  respect  to  my  being  in  my  dressing  gown  with 
my  hair  in  two  braids,  to  slip  into  my  bedroom  and 
experience,  as  I  looked  back  at  him  through  the 
crack  in  the  door,  the  kind  of  softening  a  woman 
has  toward  a  man  she  has  made  comfortable.  The 
light  of  my  lamp,  which  was  shaded  for  reading,  like 
a  miniature  calcium,  brought  out  for  me  the 
frayed  edge  of  his  overcoat  and  all  the  waste  and 
misuse  of  him,  the  kind  of  faded  appeal  that  sort  of 
man  has  for  a  woman;  forlorn  as  he  was,  as  he 
put  the  bowl  back  on  the  table,  I  was  so  much  more 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  323 

forlorn  myself  that  I  was  glad  to  have  been  femi 
ninely  of  use  to  him. 

Pauline  wrote  me  to  come  out  and  stay  with  her 
during  the  protracted  cold  spell,  but  owing  to  the  diffi 
culty  in  delivery,  the  invitation  failed  to  reach  me  un 
til  the  severity  of  the  weather  was  abated.  In  any 
case  I  was  still  too  sore  at  what  seemed  to  me  the  be 
trayal  of  my  long  confidence,  to  have  been  willing  to 
have  subjected  myself  to  any  reminders  of  it.  And 
!  whatever  kindness  Pauline  meant,  it  could  hardly 
,  have  done  so  much  for  me  as  Leon  Griffin  did  by  just 
,  needing  me.  It  transpired  that  he  had  no  stove  in  his 
room,  and  the  heat  from  the  register  for  which  we 
:  were  definitely  charged  in  the  rent,  scarcely  modified 
the  edge  of  the  cold.  For  the  next  two  or  three  days 
we  spent  much  of  the  time  huddled  over  my  stove. 
Snow  ceased  to  fall  on  the  second  day,  and  nothing 
moved  in  our  view  except  now  and  then  the  surface 
of  it  was  flung  up  by  the  wind,  falling  again  fountain- 
wise  into  the  waste  of  the  untrampled  housetops 
that  stretched  from  my  window  to  the  icy  flat  of 
the  lake  darkening  under  a  dour  horizon.  Somehow, 
though  I  had  never  been  willing  to  confess  to  my 
friends  how  poor  I  was,  I  made  no  bones  of  it  with 
Griff,  as  I  had  heard  Cecelia  call  him,  a  name  that 
seemed  somehow  to  suit  the  inconsequential  nature  of 
our  relation  better  than  his  proper  title.  We  frankly 
pooled  our  funds  in  the  matter  of  food,  which  one  or 
another  of  us  slipped  out  to  buy,  and  cooked  on  my 


324  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

stove.  I  took  an  interest  in  preparing  it,  such  as  I 
hadn't  since  the  times  when  I  imagined  I  was  helping 
Tommy  on  the  way  to  growing  rich,  and  when  the 
room  was  full  of  a  warm  savoury  smell  and  the  table 
pulled  out  from  the  wall  to  make  it  serve  for  two, 
we  felt,  for  the  time,  restored  to  the  graciousness  of 
living.  We  fell  back  on  the  uses  of  domesticity,  by 
association  providing  us  with  a  sense  of  life  going  on  in 
orderliness  and  stability.  It  came  out  for  me  in 
these  moments  that  it  is  after  all  life  that  Art  needs, 
rather  than  feeling,  and  that,  to  a  woman  of  my 
capacity,  was  to  be  supplied  not  by  innocuous  in 
trigues  like  Jerry's  but  by  the  normal  procedure  of 
living.  I  believe  I  felt  myself  rather  of  a  better 
stripe,  to  find  it  so  in  the  domestic  proceeding, 
though  I  do  not  really  know  that  my  necessity  was 
any  whit  superior  to  Miss  Filette's,  except  in  offering 
the  minimum  possibility  of  making  anybody  un 
happy  by  it.  But  because  I  knew  my  friends  would 
think  it  ridiculous  that  I  could  lay  hold  of  power 
again  by  so  inconsiderable  a  handle  as  Leon  Griffin, 
I  suffered  a  corroding  resentment.  Griffin  was  get 
ting  up  a  new  act  for  himself,  and  evenings  as  I 
helped  him  with  it,  I  felt  a  faint  stirring  of  creative 
power.  When  he  had  finished,  I  would  take  the 
shade  off  the  lamp  and  render  scenes  for  him  from 
my  favourite  Elizabethan  drama;  and  in  the  face  of 
his  unqualified  admiration  for  me,  I  could  almost 
act. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  325 

Toward  the  end  of  the  week  as  the  cold  abated, 
Mr.  Griffin  asked  me  to  see  a  play  in  which  some  of  his 
friends  were  playing;  and  Jerry  being  prodigal  of 
favours,  I  responded  with  an  invitation  to  "The 
Futurist."  I  hadn't  mentioned  Griff  to  Sarah,  I 
never  more  than  mentioned  him  to  any  of  my  friends, 
but  I  saw  no  reason  why  I  should  not  speak  of  them 
to  him,  especially  when  they  were  so  much  upon 
the  public  tongue  as  Sarah  was  just  then. 

"Croyden?"  he  said;  "isn't  that  an  unusual 
name?"  He  appeared  to  be  puzzling  over  it.  "I 
seem  to  remember  a  town  somewhere  by  that  name. " 

"In  New  York,"  I  told  him.  I  was  on  the  point 
of  telling  him  how  Sarah  came  by  it,  but  an  impulse 
of  discretion  saved  me.  I  had  seen  "The  Futurist" 
so  many  times  now,  that,  once  at  the  theatre,  I 
occupied  my  self  with  looking  at  the  audience  and 
took  no  sort  of  notice  of  my  escort  until  after 
Sarah's  entrance  near  the  close  of  the  first  act. 

"Well?"  I  laid  myself  open  to  compliments  for 
my  friend.  I  was  startled  by  what  I  saw  when  I 
looked  at  him.  He  had  shrunk  away  into  the  corner 
of  his  seat  farthest  from  me,  like  a  man  whose  gar 
ment  had  fallen  from  him  unawares.  The  stark 
naked  soul  of  him  fed  visibly  upon  her  bodily  per 
fection;  Sarah's  beauty  took  men  like  that  some 
times  when  they  were  able  to  see  it  —  there  were 
those  who  thought  her  merely  nice-looking.  I  could 
see  his  tongue  moving  about  stealthily  to  wet  his  dry 


326  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

lips.  I  couldn't  bear  to  look  at  him  like  that;  it 
seemed  a  pitiful  thing  for  a  man  to  ache  so  with  the 
beauty  of  a  woman  he  had  long  ceased  to  deserve; 
it  was  as  though  he  had  laid  bare  some  secret  ache 
in  me. 

Coming  out  of  the  theatre  he  surprised  me  with  a 
knowledge  of  Sarah's  affairs.  He  knew  that  she  had 
begun  with  O'Farrell. 

"I  played  with  him  myself,"  he  admitted;  "that 
was  before  Miss  —  Miss " 

"Croyden,"  I  supplied;  "that  was  the  town  she 
came  from;  I  shouldn't  have  told  you  except  that 
you  seem  to  know. " 

"I  was  expecting  another  name.  Wasn't  she  — 
wasn't  she  married  once?  A  fellow  by  the  name  of 
Lawrence. " 

"Oh,  well,  you  may  call  it  married.    He  was  a 


cur." 


"You  can't  tell  me  anything  about  him  worse  than 
I  know  myself."  From  the  earnestness  of  his  tone 
I  judged  that  he  had  suffered  something  at  the  hands 
of  Lawrence.  "But  I'll  say  this  for  him,  he  didn't 
stay  with  the  other  woman;  she  followed  him  and 
found  him,  but  he  wouldn't  stay  with  her. " 

"I  don't  see  that  that  proves  anything  except  that 
he  was  the  greater  scoundrel.  The  other  woman 
was  his  wife." 

"It  proves  that  he  loved  Miss  Croyden  best  — 
that  he  couldn't  bear  the  other  woman  after  her." 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  327 

I  thought  it  was  no  use  matching  ethical  ideals  with 
him  and  I  let  the  matter  drop.  It  came  back  to  me 
next  day  that  if  he  had  been  with  O'Farrell  in 
Lawrence's  time,  he  might  have  known  something  of 
the  other  Shamrocks.  I  meant  to  ask  him  about  it 
in  the  morning,  but  put  it  off  as  I  observed  that  the 
recollection  of  it  seemed  to  have  stirred  him  past 
the  point  of  being  able  to  sleep.  He  was  pale  in  the 
morning,  and  the  rings  under  his  eyes  stood  out 
plainly;  he  had  the  whipped  look  of  a  man  who  has 
been  so  long  accused  of  misdemeanour  that  he  comes 
at  last  to  believe  he  has  done  it.  I  could  see  the 
impulse  to  confess  hovering  over  him,  and  the  hope 
that  I  might  find  in  his  misbehaviours  the  excus 
ing  clue  which  he  was  vaguely  aware  must  be  there, 
but  couldn't  himself  lay  hands  on.  I  suppose  souls  in 
the  Pit  must  have  movements  like  that  —  seeking 
in  one  another  the  extenuations  they  can't  admit  to 
themselves. 

We  didn't,  however,  strike  the  note  of  confidence 
until  it  was  evening.  Griffin  kept  up  the  form  of 
looking  for  an  engagement,  which  occupied  his  morn 
ing  hours,  and  in  the  afternoon  Jerry  came  in  to  see 
how  I  had  come  through  the  cold  spell,  and  to  win 
my  interest  with  his  wife  to  consent  to  his  going  as 
far  as  St.  Louis  with  "The  Futurist."  I  forget  what 
reasons  he  had  for  thinking  it  advisable,  except  that 
they  were  all  more  or  less  complicated  with  Miss 
Filette. 


328  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"But,  heavens,  Jerry,  haven't  you  ever  heard  of 
the  freemasonry  of  women?  How  can  you  think 
my  sympathies  wouldn't  be  with  your  wife?  Es 
pecially  in  her  condition. " 

"It's  only  for  a  week;  and,  you  know,  except  for 
her  fussing,  she  is  perfectly  well.  And  look  here, 
Olivia,  you  know  exactly  why  I  have  to  have  — 
other  things;  why  I  can't  just  settle  down  to  being 
—  the  plain  head  of  the  family."  His  tone  was 
accusing. 

"I  know  why  you  think  you  have  to.  Honest, 
Jerry,  is  it  so  imperative  as  all  that?" 

"Honest  to  God,  Olivia,  unless  I'm  ...  in 
terested  ...  I  can't  write  a  word. "  His  glance 
travelling  over  my  dull  little  room  and  makeshift 
furniture,  the  cheap  kerosene  lamp,  the  broken 
hinge  of  the  stove.  "You  ought  to  know,"  he  drove 
it  home  to  me.  I  felt  myself  involved  by  my  toler 
ation  of  Griffin  in  a  queer  kind  of  complicity. 

"What  do  you  want  me  to  do?" 

"Tell  her  you  think  it  is  to  the  advantage  of  the 
play  for  me  to  be  there  in  St.  Louis  for  the  opening. 
It's  always  good  for  an  interview,  and  that's  adver 
tising.  "  After  all  I  suppose  I  wouldn't  have  done  it 
if  I  hadn't  found  his  wife  in  a  wrapper  at  four  o'clock 
in  the  afternoon,  when  I  went  out  there.  If  she 
wouldn't  make  any  better  fight  for  herself,  who  was 
I  to  fight  for  her?  And  as  Jerry  said,  for  him  to  be 
with  the  play,  meant  advertising. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  329 

I  talked  it  over  with  Griffin  that  evening,  as  we 
sat  humped  over  my  tiny  stove  before  the  lamps 
were  lighted.  Outside  we  could  see  the  roofs  hud 
dling  together  with  the  cold,  and  far  beyond,  the 
thin  line  of  the  lake  beaten  white  with  the  wind  in  a 
fury  of  self-tormenting.  It  made  me  think  of  poor 
little  Mrs.  Gerald  under  the  lash  of  her  husband's 
vagaries. 

"I  can't  help  think  that  she'd  feel  it  less  if  she 
made  less  fuss  about  it, "  I  protested.  Griffin  shook 
his  head. 

"It's  a  mercy  she  can  do  that;  it's  when  you  can't 
do  anything  it  eats  into  you. " 

I  reflected.  "There  was  a  woman  I  knew  who 
looked  like  that.  O'Farrell's  leading  lady;  she  was 
jealous  and  there  was  nothing  she  could  do.  She 
looked  gnawed  upon!5' 

"Miss  Dean,  you  mean?" 

"I  forgot  you  said  that  you  knew  her."  I 
wanted  immensely  to  know  how  he  came  to  be  mixed 
up  with  her.  "She  was  jealous  of  me,  but  there 
was  no  cause.  How  well  did  you  know  her?" 

"I  .  .  .  she  .  .  .  I  was  married  to  her. " 
His  face  was  mottled  with  embarrassment;  it  oc 
curred  to  me  that  his  confusion  must  have  been  for 
his  complicity  in  the  fact  of  their  not  being  mar 
ried  now,  but  he  set  me  right.  "I  oughtn't  to 
have  told  it  on  her,  I  suppose.  She  married  me 
to  go  on  the  stage.  I  was  boarding  at  her  mother's 


330  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

and  I  couldn't  have  afforded  to  marry  unless  she 
had.  You  don't  know  how  handsome  she  was.  I 
knew  she  couldn't  act  ....  I  can't  myself,  but 
I  know  it  when  I  see  it.  Her  father  had  been  an 
actor  of  a  sort;  he  had  taught  her  things,  and  I 
thought  I  could  pull  her  along. " 

"She  has  got  on."  I  let  the  fact  stand  for  all  it 
was  worth. 

"Yes,  she  had  something  almost  as  good  as  acting 
.  .  .  she  could  get  hold  of  people. " 

"She  had  OTarrell.  Was  it  on  his  account  you 
separated?" 

"Long  before  that.  You  see  she  could  handle  the 
managers  in  her  own  interest,  but  she  didn't  know 
what  to  do  with  me.  So  I  —  I  got  out  of  her  way. " 
Griffin's  clothes  were  too  loose  for  him,  and  his  hair, 
which  wanted  trimming,  disposed  itself  in  what 
came  perilously  near  to  being  ringlets,  accentuating 
the  effect  of  his  having  been  shrivelled,  and  shrunk 
within  the  mark  of  his  capacity.  There  was  a 
certain  shame  about  him  as  he  made  this  admis 
sion,  that  made  me  feel  that  though  to  leave 
his  wife  free  to  seek  her  own  sort  of  success 
had  been  a  generous  thing  to  do,  it  was  all  he 
could  do;  his  moral  nature  had  suffered  an  in 
curable  strain. 

"Griff,  did  they  tell  you  when  you  were  young, 
that  love  was  all  bound  up  with  what  you  should 
do  in  the  world  and  what  you  could  get  for  it?" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  331 

"They  never  told  me  anything;  I  had  to  find  it 
out." 

"Jerry  too;  he  thought  he  was  going  to  have  a 
graceful,  docile  creature  to  keep  him  in  a  perpetual 
state  of  maleness.  I  should  have  thought  you'd 
have  left  the  stage  after  that,"  I  said,  reverting  to 
the  personal  instance. 

"I  ought  to  have,  but  somehow  I  kept  feeling  her; 
even  when  I  wasn't  thinking  of  her  I  could  feel  her 
somewhere  pulling  me.  It  was  like  living  in  the 
house  where  some  one  has  died,  and  you  keep  think- 
ing  they're  just  in  the  next  room  and  you  don't  want 
to  go  away  for  fear  you'll  lose  them  altogether. " 

"I  understand." 

The  afternoon  light  had  withdrawn  into  the  bleak 
sky  without  illuminating  it.  I  threw  open  the  stove 
for  the  sake  of  the  ruddy  light,  and  the  intimacy  of 
our  sitting  there  drew  me  on  to  counter  confession. 

"It's  like  that  with  me  all  the  time,"  I  said,  "only 
there  hasn't  really  been  anybody.  Sarah  says  there 
doesn't  have  to  be  anybody;  that  we  only  think  so 
because  we  have  felt  it  that  way  once.  She  thinks 
it  is  just  .  .  .  Personality  .  .  .  whatever 
there  is  that  we  act  to. " 

"Well,  I  know  you  have  to  have  it,  anyway  you 
can  get  it." 

"O'Farrell  used  to  call  it  feeling  your  job.  I 
wonder  where  he  is  now."  So  the  talk  drifted  off 
to  the  perpetual  professionalism  of  the  unsuccessful, 


332  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

to  incidents  of  rehearsals  and  engagements.  I  be 
lieve  it  would  have  been  good  for  me  to  have  run 
my  mind  in  new  pastures,  but  there  was  nobody  to 
open  the  gates  for  me. 

I  said  as  much  to  Sarah  the  very  next  time  I  saw 
her;  it  seemed  a  way  of  getting  at  what  I  hadn't  yet 
told  her,  that  I  was  within  a  week  or  two  of  the  end 
of  my  means.  I  had  the  best  of  reasons  for  not 
calling  my  case  to  her  attention,  in  the  readiness  with 
which  she  offered  herself  to  my  necessity. 

"You  must  go  to  New  York  of  course;  I've  three 
hundred  dollars,  and  I  could  send  you  something 
every  month "  I  cut  her  off  absolutely. 

"I'd  rather  try  Cecelia  Brune's  plan  first,"  I 
assured  her. 

"Not  while  you  have  me;"  she  was  firm  with  me. 
"  Besides,  you  don't  really  know  that  Cecelia " 

"Didn't  buy  her  diamond  sunburst  on  thirty- 
five  a  week!"  I  told  her  all  that  Griffin  had  said. 
Sarah  looked  worried. 

"I'll  tell  you  about  the  diamonds.  About  a  year 
ago,  while  you  were  with  the  Hardings,  she  got  into 
trouble.  Oh,  she  loved  him  as  much  as  she  was 
able!  He  gave  her  the  diamonds;  but  Cecelia 
cared.  And  then  when  the  trouble  came,  he  deserted 
her.  That's  what  Cecelia  couldn't  understand. 
She  had  never  given  anything  before,  and  she  didn't 
realize  that  that  had  been  her  chief  advantage.  It 
gave  her  a  scare. " 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  333 

But  in  spite  of  Sarah's  confidence  in  Cecelia's 
bitter  experience  keeping  her  straight,  I  could  see 
that  she  had  taken  what  Griffin  had  told  me  to  heart. 
A  day  or  two  later  she  referred  to  the  matter  again. " 

"If  she  goes  over  the  line  once,  and  doesn't  have 
to  pay  for  it,  she  is  lost."  She  was  standing  at  my 
window  looking  out  over  the  roofs  and  chimneys 
cased  in  ice,  and  she  might,  for  all  the  mark  her  pro 
fession  has  left  on  her,  have  been  looking  across  the 
pasture  bars .  I  was  irritated  at  her  detachment,  and 
her  interest,  in  the  face  of  my  own  problem,  in  an 
affair  so  unrelated  as  Cecelia  Brune's. 

"Why  do  you  care  so  much?" 

"You'd  care  too,  if  you  had  seen  as  much  of  her; 
it's  like  watching  a  drowning  man:  you  don't  stop 
to  ask  if  he's  worth  it  before  you  plunge  in!" 

"I  can't  swim  myself,"  I  protested. 

I  didn't  want  to  be  dragged  in,  rescuing  Cecelia;  I 
had  myself  to  save  and  wasn't  sure  I  could  do  it. 
It  was  after  this  talk,  however,  that  Griff,  who  still 
hung  about  the  Variete  from  habit,  told  me  that 
Sarah  had  fallen  into  the  way  of  stopping  to  pick  up 
Cecelia  on  her  way  home  from  her  own  theatre.  He 
thought  it  a  futile  performance. 

"Nothing  can  stop  that  kind;  they  don't  always 
know  it,  but  that's  what  draws  them  to  the  stage  in 
the  first  place.  It's  a  kind  of  what-do-you-call-it, 
going  back  to  the  thing  they  were  a  long  time  ago. " 

"Atavism,"  I  supplied;  I  thought  it  very  likely. 


334  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

All  the  centuries  of  bringing  women  up  to  be  toys 
must  have  had  its  fruit  somehow.  Cecelia  was  made 
to  be  played  with;  she  wasn't  serviceable  for  any 
thing  else.  And  what  was  more,  I  didn't  care  to  be 
identified  with  her  even  in  the  Christian  attitude  of  a 
rescuer.  I  said  as  much  to  Sarah  one  evening 'about 
a  week  later,  when  I  had  gone  with  Jerry  to  give  my 
opinion  of  some  changes  in  the  cast,  preparatory  to 
going  on  the  road  with  his  play,  and  in  the  overflow 
of  his  satisfaction  at  the  way  the  audience  rose  to 
them,  he  had  asked  me  to  go  to  supper  with  him. 
Then  as  Sarah  joined  us  and  the  spirit  of  the  crowd 
caught  him,  pouring  along  the  street,  bright  almost 
as  by  day  and  with  the  added  brightness  of  evening 
garments,  Jerry,  always  open  to  the  infection  of  the 
holiday  mood,  proposed  that  for  once  we  stretch  a 
point  by  going  to  supper  at  Reeves 's.  Sarah  and  I 
demurred  as  women  will  at  such  a  proposal  from  a 
man  whose  family  exigencies  are  known  to  them,  but 
Sarah  found  a  prohibitory  objection  in  a  promise  she 
professed  to  have  made,  to  go  around  for  Cecelia  on 
her  way  home,  which  Jerry  promptly  quashed  by 
including  her  in  the  invitation.  I  protested. 

"Supper  at  Reeves's  is  quite  enough  of  an  adven 
ture  for  one  time.  Cecelia  paints. " 

"Not  really,"  Sarah  protested.  "It's  only  that 
she  uses  so  little  make-up  that  she  doesn't  think  it 
necessary  to  take  it  off. " 

"All  the  better,"  insisted  Jerry.     "I  never  did 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  335 

take  supper  at  Reeves's  with  a  painted  lady,  and  I'm 
told  it  is  quite  one  of  the  things  to  do. " 

I  let  it  pass  rather  than  spoil  his  high  mood.  It 
was  not  more  than  three  blocks  to  the  Variete,  and 
at  the  stage  door  Sarah  insisted  on  getting  out  herself. 

"Why  did  you  let  her?"  I  protested  to  Jerry. 

"Because  it  will  please  her,  and  Miss  Brune  will  be 
gone;  Sarah  doesn't  realize  how  late  we  are."  I 
could  see  her  returning  through  the  fogged  glass  of 
the  stage  door. 

"Cecelia's  gone!  The  man  said  she  was  going  to 
Reeves's  too;  we  can  pick  her  up  there." 

"Oh,"  I  objected,  "I  can  stand  Cecelia,  but  I 
draw  the  line  at  her  gentleman  friends.  She  didn't 
go  there  alone,  I  fancy. " 

"We'll  have  a  look  at  him,  anyway,  before  we  give 
him  the  glad  hand, "  Jerry  temporized. 

The  cab  discharged  us  into  the  press  of  black- 
coated  men  and  bright-gowned  women  that  at  that 
hour  poured  steadily  into  the  anteroom  of  Reeves's, 
which  was  level  with  the  pavement,  divided  from  it 
by  a  screen  of  plate  glass  and  palms.  Beyond  that 
and  raised  by  a  few  steps,  was  the  palm  room,  flanked 
on  either  side  by  dressing  rooms;  and  opening  out 
back,  the  great  revolving  doors,  muffled  with  crimson 
curtains,  that  received  the  guests  and  sorted  them 
like  a  hopper,  according  to  the  degree  of  their  re 
sistance  to  the  particular  allurements  of  Reeves's. 
There  was  a  sleek,  satin-suited  attendant  who  swung 


336  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  leaves  of  the  door  at  just  the  right  angle  that 
inducted  you  to  the  public  cafe,  or  to  the  corridor 
that  led  to  private  rooms,  and  was  famed  never  to 
have  made  a  mistake.  Jerry  dared  us  hilariously  as 
we  went  up  the  steps,  to  put  his  discrimination  to  the 
test. 

"You  and  I  alone  then;  Olivia's  black  dress 
would  give  us  away,"  Sarah  insisted. 

"I  want  you  to  stay  here  and  watch  for 
Cecelia,"  she  whispered  to  me;  "I  must  see  her;  I 
must. " 

Her  going  on  with  Jerry  would  give  her  an  oppor 
tunity  to  look  through  the  cafe;  if  Cecelia  hadn't 
already  arrived,  I  would  be  sure  to  see  her  come  in 
with  the  crowd  that  broke  against  the  bank  of  palms 
into  two  streams  of  bright  and  dark,  proceeding  to 
the  dressing  rooms,  and  returning  by  twos  and 
threes  to  be  swallowed  up  by  the  hopper  turning 
half  unseen  behind  its  velvet  curtains.  I  slipped 
behind  a  group  of  bright-gowned  women  waiting 
for  their  escorts  under  the  palms.  I  was  hypnotized 
by  the  movement  and  the  glitter;  I  believe  I  forgot 
what  I  was  looking  for;  and  all  at  once  she  was 
before  me. 

The  theatrical  quality  of  Cecelia's  prettiness  and 
the  length  of  her  plumes  would  have  picked  her  out 
anywhere  even  without  the  blackened  rim  of  the 
eyelids  and  the  air  she  had  always  of  having  just 
stepped  into  the  spot  light. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  337 

She  had  stationed  herself,  with  her  professional 
instinct  for  effect,  just  under  the  Australian  fern 
tree,  waiting  for  her  escort,  and  in  the  moment  it 
took  me  to  gather  myself  together  he  joined  her. 
I  had  come  up  behind  Cecelia  and  was  brought  face 
to  face  with  him;  it  wasn't  until  he  had  wheeled  into 
step  with  her  that  he  saw  me  and  his  face  went 
mottled  all  at  once  and  settled  to  a  slow  purple. 
Cecelia  was  magnificent. 

"Oh,  you  here!  How  de  do!"  She  slipped  her 
hand  under  her  escort's  arm  and  sailed  out  with  him. 
I  caught  the  glint  of  the  brass-bound  door  under  the 
curtains.  I  don't  know  how  long  I  stood  staring 
before  I  started  after  her,  to  be  met  by  the  leaves  of 
the  revolving  door  which,  reversing  its  motion,  pro 
jected  Sarah  and  Jerry  into  the  palm  room  beside 


me. 

H 


I  have  been  all  over  the  cafe "  Sarah  began. 

"Didn't  you  meet  her?" 

"In  the  cafe?    I  was  just  telling  you    .     .     .   '* 

"No,  no.  In  the  corridor,  just  now;  they  went 
through." 

"But    they    couldn't,"    urged    Sarah.     "I    was 
standing  at  the  door  of  the  cafe  with  Jerry    ... 
The  truth  of  the  situation  began  to  dawn  on  her. 

"There's  such  a  crowd,  of  course  you  missed  her." 
Jerry  began  to  build  up  a  probability  by  which  we 
could  sustain  Sarah  through  the  supper  which 
followed.  We  all  of  us  talked  a  great  deal  as  people 


338  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

will  when  they  are  anxious  not  to  talk  of  a  particular 
thing.  When  we  were  in  the  dressing  room  again, 
putting  on  our  wraps,  Sarah  turned  on  me. 

"She  wasn't  in  the  cafe  at  all,"  she  declared. 

"I  never  said  she  was.  I  said  she  went  through 
into  the  corridor."  In  the  silence  I  could  feel 
Cecelia  dropping  into  the  pit. 

"Did  you  know  the  man?" 

I  nodded.     "  It  was  Henry  Mills!" 


CHAPTER  VI 

BEFORE  I  had  an  opportunity  to  talk  the  incident 
over  with  Sarah,  she  had  seen  Cecelia. 

"She  is  perfectly  furious  with  you,"  she  reported. 
"She  hasn't  heard  from  Mr.  Mills  since,  and  she 
thinks  it  is  on  your  account;  that  you  have  taken 
steps  for  breaking  it  off." 

"Well,  if  she  admits  there  was  something  to  break 
off  ...  I  tell  you,  Sarah,  you  are  fretting 
yourself  to  no  purpose,  the  girl  had  been  there 
before." 

" I'm  afraid  so. "  Sarah's  taking  it  so  much  to  heart 
was  a  credit  to  her,  but  I  was  more  curious  than 
commiserating. 

"Tell  me,  what  is  in  the  mind  of  a  girl  when  she 
does  things  like  that?  What  does  she  get  out  of  it?  " 

"Excitement,  of  course;  the  sense  of  being  in  the 
stir,  and  the  feeling  of  being  protected.  She  says 
Mr.  Mills  has  been  kind  to  her.  It  is  odd,  but  she 
seems  to  think  it  is  all  right  so  long  as  it  is  going  on; 
it  is  only  when  it  is  broken  off  she  can't  bear  it. 
That  is  why  she  is  so  angry  at  you. " 

"There  might  be  something  in  that,"  I  conceded. 
"When  it  is  broken  off  she  is  able  to  realize  how  cheap 
and  temporary  it  has  been;  while  it  is  going  on  she 

339 


340  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

can  justify  it  on  the  ground  that  it  is  going  on  forever. 
That  would  justify  it,  I  suppose."  I  did  not  know 
how  I  knew  this,  but  lately  I  had  discovered  in 
myself  capacities  for  understanding  a  great  many 
things  of  which  I  had  had  no  experience.  What  con 
cerned  me  was  not  Cecelia's  relation  to  the  incident. 

"Whatever  am  I  going  to  do  about  going  there 
again,  to  Pauline's,  I  mean?" 

"You  can't  tell!" 

"And  I  can't  go  there  and  not  tell.  I've  got  to 
choose  between  deceiving  Pauline  and  condoning 
Henry,  and  I've  no  disposition  to  do  either. "  Sarah 
thought  it  over. 

"There  is  only  one  thing  you  can  do.  You'll 
simply  have  to  go  to  New  York. " 

"For  a  great  many  reasons  besides.  You  needn't 
tell  me  that.  But  how?  How?  " 

"You  know  what  I  offered " 

"What  I  refused.  It  is  out  of  the  question. 
Don't  speak  of  it. " 

"I  suppose  after  this  you  couldn't  ask  the  Millses?" 

"Sarah    .     .     .     I  did  ask." 

"Well?"  All  her  interest  hung  upon  the  inter 
rogation. 

"They  told  me  it  was  good  for  my  spiritual  devel 
opment  to  suffer  these  things."  We  faced  one 
another  in  deep,  unsmiling  irony.  "Sarah,  what 
do  you  suppose  it  costs  a  man  for  supper  and  a  pri 
vate  room  at  Reeves's?" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  341 

"Don't!"  she  begged.  "It's  only  a  step  from 
that  to  Cecelia." 

"Yes;  I  remember  she  said  that  men  never  afforded 
protection  to  women  except  for  value  received. " 

"You  must  go  to  New  York,"  Sarah  reiterated. 
"You  must!" 

The  truth  was  I  had  never  told  Sarah  exactly  how 
poor  I  was. 

In  the  end  I  let  her  go  away  without  telling;  at 
the  worst  I  thought  I  might  borrow  from  Jerry,  who 
had  given  up  the  notion  of  going  to  St.  Louis,  largely 
no  doubt  because  I  had  failed  to  back  him  up  in  it 
completely,  and  then  just  at  the  end  changed  his 
mind  and  went  anyway.  I  knew  nothing  about  it 
until  Jerry  wrote  me  from  Springfield,  for  I  had 
grown  shy  of  going  there  where  all  Mrs.  McDermott's 
conversation  was  set  like  a  trap  to  catch  me  in  some 
thing  that  would  convict  Jerry  of  misdemeanour. 
Jerry  asked  me  to  visit  her  in  his  absence,  but  I  put 
it  off  as  long  as  possible.  I  had  to  settle  first  about 
going  to  Pauline's.  I  arranged  to  spend  the  after 
noon  there,  meaning  to  come  away  before  dinner  and 
so  by  leaving  Henry  to  discover  my  attitude  in  the 
circumstance  of  my  having  been  there  without  de 
stroying  his  home,  open  the  way  to  my  meeting  him 
again  without  embarrassment.  To  do  that  I  should 
have  left  the  house  before  the  persuasive  smell  of  the 
dinner  began  to  creep  up  the  stairs  into  the  warm, 
softly  lighted  rooms,  but  from  the  beginning  of  my 


342  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

visit,  Pauline,  in  order  that  I  might  not  feel  her  fail 
ure  to  put  her  affection  more  cogently,  had  wound 
me  about  as  with  a  cocoon  of  feminine  devices,  from 
which  I  hadn't  been  able  to  extricate  myself  earlier. 
I  am  not  blaming  her,  I  am  not  sure,  indeed,  seeing 
how  completely  she  justified  herself  to  Henry  Mills 
by  what  she  had  to  offer,  that  I  had  any  right  to 
expect  her  to  understand  how  completely  her  playful 
and  charming  affectionateness  failed  of  any  possible 
use  to  me.  But  I  felt  myself  so  far  helpless  in  the 
presence  of  it,  that  I  stayed  on  until  the  smell  of 
the  roast  unloosened  all  the  joints  of  my  resolution. 
I  hadn't  realized  how  hungry  I  was  until  I  found  my 
self  at  a  point  where  what  Henry  might  think  of  me 
became  inconsiderable  before  the  possibility  of  my 
being  put  out  of  the  house  before  dinner  was  served. 

At  the  same  time  I  could  have  wept  at  the  indig 
nity  of  wanting  food  so  much.  I  remember  to  this 
day  the  wasteful  heaping  of  the  children's  plates, 
and  my  struggle  with  the  oblique  desire  to  smuggle 
portions  of  my  helping  home  to  Griff,  who  looked 
even  more  of  a  stranger  than  I  to  soup  and  fish  and 
roast,  to  say  nothing  of  dessert. 

It  wasn't  until  we  had  got  as  far  as  the  salad  that 
I  had  leisure  to  observe  Henry  grow  rather  red  about 
the  gills  as  he  fed,  and  speculate  as  to  how  far  it  was 
due  to  his  consciousness  that  I  could  bring  down 
the  pillars  of  his  home  with  a  word,  and  didn't 
intend  to. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  343 

There  was  nothing  said  during  dinner  about  my 
prospects  or  the  stage  in  general,  but  when  Henry 
took  me  out  to  the  car  about  nine  o'clock,  he  cleared 
his  throat  several  times  as  though  to  drag  the  subject 
up  from  the  pit  of  his  stomach,  where  it  must  have 
lain  very  uneasily. 

"You  know,"  he  began,  "I've  been  thinking 
about  that  scheme  of  yours  of  going  to  New  York. 
I  am  inclined  to  think  there  is  something  in  it. " 

"I  haven't  thought  about  it  for  a  long  time,"  I 
told  him,  which  was  only  true  in  so  far  as  I  thought 
of  it  as  a  possibility. 

"It  would  freshen  you  up  a  whole  lot,"  Henry 
insisted.  "Everybody  needs  freshening.  I  have 
been  taking  a  little  stir  about  myself."  So  that 
was  the  way  he  wished  me  to  think  of  his  relation  to 
Cecelia! 

"I've  given  it  up,"  I  insisted. 

We  were  standing  under  the  swinging  arc  light 
in  a  bare  patch  the  wind  had  cleared  of  the  fine, 
white  February  grit.  Little  trails  of  it  blew  up 
under  foot  and  were  lost  among  the  wind-shaken 
shadows.  I  could  see  Henry's  purpose  bearing 
down  on  me  like  the  far  spark  of  the  approaching 
trolley. 

"I  wouldn't  do  that,"  he  advised.  "It  looks  like 
pretty  good  business  to  me.  You'd  have  to  stay 
there  some  time  to  learn  the  ropes  and  if  a  few  hun 
dred  dollars " 


344  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"I've  given  it  up,"  I  said  again.  The  car  came 
alongside  and  Henry  helped  me  on  to  it. 

"If  you  were  at  any  time  to  reconsider  it,  I  hope 

you  will  let  me  know "  The  roar  of  the  trolley 

cut  him  off. 

I  knew  I  was  a  fool  not  to  have  accepted  the  sop 
to  my  discretion;  I  don't  know  for  what  the  Powers 
had  delivered  Henry  Mills  into  my  hands,  if  it  wasn't 
to  get  out  of  his  folly  what  his  sober  sense  refused  me. 
Without  doubt  there  are  some  forms  of  integrity  that, 
persisted  in,  cease  to  be  a  virtue  and  become  merely  a 
habit;  I  could  no  more  have  taken  Henry  Mills's 
money  than  I  could  have  gone  to  New  York  without 
it.  I  went  home  shivering  to  my  fireless  little  room. 
I  put  on  my  nightgown  over  my  underwear  and  my 
dressing  gown  over  that,  and  cried  myself  to  sleep. 

It  was  a  day  or  two  later  that  I  recalled  that  Jerry 
had  asked  me  to  go  out  and  see  his  wife,  and  I 
thought  if  I  must  ask  Jerry  for  help,  it  would  be  no 
more  than  prudent  for  me  to  do  so,  but  I  wasn't  in 
the  least  prepared  as  I  went  up  the  path,  from  which 
the  snow  of  the  week  before  had  never  been  cleared, 
to  find  the  house  shut  and  barred,  and  no  smoke 
issuing  from  it.  I  made  my  way  around  to  the 
kitchen  door  to  try  to  discover  some  sign  which  would 
give  me  a  clue  to  the  length  of  time  it  had  been 
deserted,  if  not  the  reason  for  it. 

While  I  was  puzzling  about  among  the  empty  milk 
bottles  and  garbage  cans,  a  neighbour  woman  put 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  345 

her  head  out  of  a  nearby  window  and  announced  the 
obvious  fact  that  Mrs.  McDermott  wasn't  in. 

"But  in  her  condition "  I  protested  as 

though  my  informant  had  been  in  some  way  respon 
sible  for  it. 

"Well,  if  her  own  mother's  isn't  the  best  place  for 
a  woman  in  her  condition!  .  .  .  Three  days 
ago,"  she  answered  to  my  second  question.  Mrs. 
McDermott's  mother  lived  in  Peoria,  and  I  knew 
that  when  Jerry  left  there  had  been  no  such  under 
standing,  but  as  lingering  there  ankle  deep  in  the  dry 
snow  didn't  seem  to  clear  the  affair,  I  undertook  to 
rid  myself  of  a  sense  of  blame  by  writing  all  that  I 
knew  of  it  to  Jerry  within  the  hour.  It  was  the  third 
day  after  that  he  came  storming  in  on  me  like  a  man 
demented.  He  had  been  to  Peoria  immediately  on 
receipt  of  my  letter  and  his  wife  had  refused  to  see 
him.  It  hardly  seemed  a  time  for  indirection. 

"Jerry,  what  have  you  done?"  I  demanded. 

"Nothing  — not  a  thing."  I  waited.  "There 
was  a  fool  skit  in  one  of  the  St.  Louis  papers,"  he 
admitted.  "The  fool  reporter  didn't  know  I  was 
married. " 

"  It  was  about  you  and  Miss  Filette?  "    He  nodded. 

"She  had  bought  all  the  St.  Louis  papers,"  he  said, 
meaning  his  wife. 

"Well,  that  was  natural;  she  wanted  to  read  the 
notices;  she  was  always  proud  of  you." 

"She  believed   them  too,"   he  groaned.     "And 


346  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

she's  talked  her  mother  over.  They  wouldn't  even 
let  me  see  the  children. "  He  put  his  head  down  on 
my  table  and  sobbed  aloud.  I  thought  it  might  be 
good  for  him,  but  by  and  by  my  sensibilities  got  the 
better  of  me. 

"Would  it  do  any  good  if  I  were  to  write?" 

"You?  Oh,  they  think  you're  in  it  ...  a 
kind  of  general  conspiracy.  You  know  you  said  that 
—  that  one  of  the  things  nobody  had  a  right  to  deny 
an  artist  was  the  source  of  his  inspiration." 

"Jerry!  I  said  what  you  asked  me."  I  was 
properly  indignant  too,  when  I  had  been  so  right  on 
the  whole  matter.  Besides,  as  Jerry  had  written 
little  that  winter  except  some  inconsiderable  ad 
ditions  to  his  play,  I  was  rather  of  the  opinion  that  he 
measured  the  validity  of  his  passion  by  its  impor 
tunity,  rather  than  its  effect  on  the  sum  of  his  pro 
duction.  "Besides,  I  told  you  you  would  never  get 
your  wife  to  understand. " 

"If  she  would  only  be  sensible,"  he  groaned. 

"She  isn't,"  I  reminded  him;  "you  didn't  marry 
her  to  be  sensible,  but  for  her  imagined  capacity  to 
go  on  repeating  the  tricks  by  which  Miss  Filette 
keeps  you  complacent  with  yourself.  The  trouble  is, 
marriage  and  having  children  take  that  out  of  a 
woman. " 

"An  artist  ought  never  to  marry.  I  will  always 
say  that." 

I  began  to  wonder  if  that  were  true,  if  Cecelia 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  347 

Brune  were  not  after  all  the  wiser.  We  beat  back 
and  forth  on  the  subject  for  the  time  that  I  kept 
Jerry  with  me.  The  evening  of  the  second  day  came 
a  telegram.  Jealousy  tearing  at  the  heart  of  poor 
little  Mrs.  McDermott  had  torn  away  the  young 
life  that  nestled  there. 

Jerry  wrote  me  later  that  the  baby  had  breathed 
and  died  and  that  his  wife  was  likely  to  be  ill  a  long 
time.  In  view  of  the  extra  expense  incurred,  I  didn't 
feel  that  I  ought  to  ask  him  for  the  loan  I  was  now  so 
desperately  in  need  of, 

It  was  about  this  time  that  Griffin  and  I  began  to 
avoid  one  another  about  meal  time.  I  have  read 
how  wild  animals  in  sickness  turn  their  backs  on  one 
another;  one  must  in  unrelievable  misery.  .  .  . 
we  dodged  in  and  out  of  our  hall  rooms  like  rabbits 
in  a  warren.  And  then  suddenly  we  would  meet  and 
walk  along  the  streets  together,  mostly  at  night 
when  the  alternate  flare  of  the  lamps  and  the  dark 
ness  and  the  hurrying  half -seen  forms  numb  the 
sense  like  the  flicker  of  light  on  a  hypnotist's  screen, 
and  we  moved  in  a  strange,  incommunicable  world 
out  of  which  no  help  reached  us.  We  saw  women  go 
by  with  the  price  of  our  redemption  flashing  at  their 
breasts  or  in  their  hair.  We  saw  men  hurried,  over 
burdened  with  work,  and  there  was  no  work  for  us. 
In  our  own  land  we  were  exiled  from  the  community 
of  labour  and  we  sighed  for  it  more  than  the  meanest 
Siberian  prisoner  for  home.  And  then  suddenly 


348  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

communication  seemed  to  be  reestablished.  Effie 
for  no  reason  sent  me  half  of  the  rent  money.  "I 
don't  need  it  here,  and  I  think  maybe  I  shall  get 
more  out  of  it  by  investing  it  in  you,"  she  wrote. 
She  had  always  such  a  way  of  making  the  thing  she 
did  seem  the  choice  of  her  soul.  I  bought  meat  and 
vegetables  and  invited  Griff  to  dinner.  He  took 
me  that  night  to  that  sort  of  dreary  entertainment 
known  as  musical  comedy.  He  could  often  get 
tickets  and  it  was  a  way  of  spending  the  evening  that 
saved  fuel.  As  we  tramped  back  through  the  chill, 
trying  for  an  effect  of  jocularity  in  his  voice,  so  that 
he  might  seem  to  have  made  a  joke  in  case  I  shouldn't 
like  it,  Griff  said  to  me. 

"I  suppose  you  wouldn't  go  with  a  musical 
comedy?" 

"My  dear  Griff,"  I  answered  him  in  the  same 
tone,  "I'd  go  with  a  flying  trapeze  if  only  it  paid 
enough. " 

"I'm  acquainted  with  Lowe,  the  tenor.  I've  been 

thinking  I'd  ask  him "  We  were  as  shy  of 

speaking  of  an  engagement  as  though  it  were  wild 
game  to  be  scared  away  by  the  mere  mention  of  it. 

There  was  no  reason  why  Griffin  shouldn't  have 
succeeded  in  musical  comedy,  he  had  a  fairish  voice 
and  had  turned  his  gift  as  many  times  as  the  minis 
ter's  wife  in  Higgleston  used  to  turn  her  black  silk. 
It  was  not  more  than  two  days  or  three  after  that,  as 
I  was  coming  back  to  my  cold  room  in  the  twilight 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  349 

—  I  had  spent  the  day  in  the  public  library  on 
account  of  the  heat  —  and  as  I  was  fumbling  at  the 
lock  as  I  had  been  that  first  evening  he  had  spoken 
to  me,  I  heard  Leon  Griffin  come  up  the  stair  three 
steps  at  a  time,  and  I  knew  before  I  heard  it  in  his 
voice,  that  the  times  had  turned  for  him.  I  struck 
out  fiercely  against  a  sudden  blankness  that  seemed 
to  swim  up  to  the  eyes  and  throat  of  me. 

He  was  trembling  too  as  he  came  into  the  room. 

"Olive,"  he  cried,  "Olive,  I've  turned  the  trick. 
I'm  going  with  the  Tlim-Flams.'"  That  was  the 
wretched  piece  we  had  seen  together.  He  had  never 
called  me  by  my  name  before,  and  I  had  no  mind  to 
correct  him.  In  the  dusk  he  ran  on  about  his 
engagement;  they  would  go  on  the  road  presently  and 
settle  for  the  summer  in  some  city.  I  heard  him 
speak  far  from  me.  I  was  down,  down  in  the  pit  of 
the  cold  room  with  the  shabby  furniture  and  the 
bleak  light  that  disdained  it  from  the  one  high 
window. 

"Don't  take  off  your  things,"  I  heard  him  say. 
"I  came  to  get  you.  We'll  have  a  blow-out  some 
where.  Olive,  Olive!"  His  quick  sympathy  came 
out,  and  the  excusing  charm.  "Oh,  my  dear,  you're 
crying!" 

"Griff,  you're  leaving  me."  It  was  as  if  I  had 
accused  him.  I  sank  down  in  a  chair;  I  was  dabbling 
at  my  eyes  and  trying  to  get  my  veil  off  with  cold 
fingers. 


350  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Not  if  you  feel  that  way  about  it."  He  came  and 
put  his  arms  about  me  and  constrained  me  until  I 
leaned  against  his  body.  I  knew  what  he  was, 
what  a  man  of  that  stamp  must  be  feeling  and  think 
ing,  and,  knowing,  I  permitted  it.  I  was  crying  still, 
I  think  ...  his  hands  came  fumbling  under  my  veil 
.  .  .  presently  he  kissed  me. 

"Olivia?" 

"Well,  Griff!" 

"You  know  —  it  is  for  you  to  say  if  I  shall  leave 
you." 

"You  mean  that  you  will  give  up  ...  but 
how  can  you,  Griff;  it  is  the  only  thing  that's  been 
offered. "  We  were  sitting  still  on  the  low  cot  in  my 
room  and  there  was  no  light  but  the  dull  glow  of  the 
stove  and  the  last  trace  of  the  day  that  came  in  at  the 
window.  We  had  not  been  out  to  dinner  yet,  and 
Griffin's  arm  was  around  me.  I  could  feel  it  slack  a 
little  now  as  if  he  definitely  forebore  to  constrain  me. 

"I  mean,  Lowe  could  get  you  a  place  in  the 
chorus. " 

"But,  Griff,  I  can't  sing." 

"You  can  sing  enough  for  that,  and  Lowe  would 
get  you  the  place  if  —  if  you  belonged  to  me."  I 
knew  exactly  what  this  implied,  but  no  start  re 
sponded  to  it.  The  nerve  of  propriety  had  ached 
out. 

"Of  course  I  know  I'm  not  in  your  class,"  Griff 
was  going  on.  "I  wouldn't  do  such  a  thing  as  ask 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  351 

you  to  marry  me.  But  I'm  awfully  fond  of  you 
.  .  .  and  you're  up  against  it." 

"Yes,  Griff,  I'm  up  against  it." 

"Your  fine  friends  .  .  .  what  would  they  do 
for  you?" 

"Nothing  whatever." 

"Well,  then  .  *.  >  you  needn't  go  under  your 
own  name,  and  this  is  a  chance;  you  could  live  and 
maybe  get  somewhere.  Lowe  told  me  he  meant  to 
strike  for  Broadway.  You  aren't  insulted,  are  you?  " 

"No,  I'm  not  insulted."  Curiously  that  was 
true.  I  was  drunk  and  shaking  inside  of  me;  I 
seemed  to  be  poised  upon  the  dizzying  edge,  but 
I  was  neither  angry  nor  insulted. 

"And  I'd  never  come  back  on  you  if  you  got  your 
chance  for  yourself  .  •-«•;  &  honest  to  God,  Olive. 
I've  had  my  lesson  at  that.  You  believe  me,  don't 
you?" 

I  believed  him.  I  hadn't  any  sense  whatever  of 
the  moral  values  of  the  situation.  It  was  too  desper 
ate  for  that. 

"I  guess  I  ought  to  tell  you  .  .  .  I'm  a  bad 
sort  .  4  *  bad  with  women.  After  I  knew  that 
my  —  that  Miss  Dean  didn't  want  me,  I  didn't  care 
what  became  of  me.  There  was  a  woman  in  the 
company  .  .  .  she  liked  me,  and  I  thought  it 
would  give  Laura  a  chance.  That  was  what  the 
divorce  was  about.  I  thought  I  could  make  it  up  to 
the  other  woman  by  marrying  her.  But  that  didn't 


352  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

work  either. "  He  was  silent  a  while,  forgetting  per 
haps  that  he  had  begun  to  explain  himself  to  me. 
"There's  a  way  you've  got  to  like  a  person  to  live 
with  them  .  .  .  and,  anyway,  I'm  not  asking 
you  to  marry  me. "  He  got  as  much  satisfaction  out 
of  that  as  if  it  were  a  superior  abnegation. 

"You've  got  to  decide,  right  away,"  Griffin  urged 
me. 

"I  must  have  a  day  to  think,"  I  insisted,  not 
because  I  hoped  that  anything  would  interfere 
between  me  and  disaster,  but  I  wanted  to  be  able 
to  throw  it  up  to  the  Powers  that  I  had  given  them 
an  opportunity. 

I  knew  what  he  was.  I  had  always  known. 
When  he  put  his  cheek  against  mine  to  kiss  me  I  had 
felt  the  marks  there  of  waste  and  looseness,  just 
as  I  felt  now  that  native  trick  he  had  for  extenuation, 
for  putting  himself  on  the  pathetic,  the  excusing  side 
of  things.  But  I  did  not  shrink  from  him.  I  suppose 
it  was  because  just  then  he  was  a  symbol  of  the  pro 
tection  which  I  had  so  signally  gone  without.  The 
need  of  trusting  is  stronger  in  women  than  experi 
ence.  Nothing  saved  me  but  the  persistent  monitor 
of  my  art.  Here,  when  all  else  was  numbed  by  lone 
liness  and  hunger  and  unsuccess,  it  waked  and 
warned  me.  I  had  not  drawn  back  from  Griffin  nor 
the  relation  he  proposed  to  me;  but  I  couldn't  stand 
for  Flim-Flam.  I  think  just  at  first,  though,  I 
made  myself  believe  I  was  considering  it. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  353 

I  went  out  to  see  Pauline  the  next  afternoon.  Not 
that  I  expected  anything  from  her.  It  was  merely 
that  she  represented  all  that  stood  opposed  to  what 
I  was  being  coerced  into,  and  I  meant  to  give  it  a 
chance. 

"I  am  thinking  of  going  with  "Flim-Flam"  I  told 
her. 

"Oh,  but  my  dear  —  surely  not  with  that!" 

"I'll  get  eighteen  dollars  a  week  and  my  ex 
penses.  " 

"Well,  of  course,  if  you  want  to  sell  yourself  just 
for  a  salary!"  Pauline's  attitude  could  not  have 
been  improved  on  if  she  had  known  all  that  the 
engagement  implied,  but  it  wasn't  in  her  to  be 
ungracious  for  long.  "I  suppose  you'll  get  expe 
rience?" 

"I'll  get  my  board  and  clothes  out  of  it,"  I  told 
her  bluntly.  "And  whether  I  like  it  or  not,  it  is  the 
only  thing  offered. " 

"And  you  are  just  taking  it  on  trust?  I  suppose 
that  is  the  right  way;  you  can  never  tell  how  things 
will  be  brought  about. "  I  don't  know  how  much  of 
this  was  honest,  and  how  much  derived  from  the 
capacity  for  self-deception  which  grows  on  women 
whose  sole  business  in  life  is  getting  on  with  a  man. 
At  any  rate,  having  shaken  my  situation  around  to 
the  shape  of  a  moral  attitude,  as  a  robin  does  a 
worm,  nothing  would  have  prevented  her  from  swal 
lowing  it  whole. 


354  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

Faint  as  I  was  I  refused  her  invitation  to  dinner. 
With  what  I  had  in  mind  to  do  I  didn't  care  to  meet 
Henry  Mills  again.  I  was  fiercer  in  my  detestation 
of  him  and  Cecelia  than  I  had  been  before  I  had 
thought  of  being  in  the  same  case  myself.  I  re 
sented  them  as  a  ribald  commentary  on  my  neces 
sity. 

As  I  rode  home  on  the  car,  all  my  outer  self  was  in  a 
tumult,  dazed  and  buzzing  like  a  hive.  I  was 
dimly  aware  of  moving,  sitting  upright,  of  paying  my 
fare,  and  of  great  staring  red  posters  that  flashed 
upon  me  from  the  billboards.  I  remember  that  it 
occurred  to  me  several  times  that  if  I  could  only 
understand  what  I  read  on  them,  it  might  be  greatly 
to  my  profit.  Somewhere  deep  under  my  con 
fusion  I  was  aware  of  being  plucked  by  the  fringes 
of  my  consciousness.  Something  was  trying  to  get 
through  to  me. 

I  refused  to  see  Griffin  at  all  that  evening,  and  got 
into  bed  early,  staring  into  the  dark  and  seeing 
nothing  but  fragments  of  red  letters  that  seemed 
about  to  shape  themselves  into  the  saving  word,  and 
then  dissolved  and  left  me  blank.  I  tried  to  pray 
and  realized  that  I  had  no  connecting  wires  over 
which  help  might  come. 

Belief  in  the  God  I  had  been  brought  up  to,  had 
been  beaten  out  of  me  at  Higgleston,  very  largely  by 
the  conviction  of  those  who  professed  to  know  Him 
best,  that  He  couldn't  in  any  case  be  the  God  of  my 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  355 

Gift.  And  I  hadn't  been  thinking  since  then  of  the 
Something  Without  Us  to  which  I  acted,  as  Deity. 
Now  it  occurred  to  me,  lying  there  in  the  dark,  that 
if  the  God  of  the  Church  had  cast  me  off,  there  must  still 
be  something  which  artists  everywhere  prayed  to,  a 
Distributer  of  Gifts  who  might  be  concerned  about 
the  conduct  of  His  worshippers. 

I  reached  out  for  Him  —  and  I  did  not  know  His 
name.  I  must  pray  though,  I  must  pray  to  some 
thing  which  stood  for  Help.  Slowly,  as  I  cast  back 
in  my  mind  to  find  the  name  for  it,  I  remembered 
Eversley.  Eversley  was  everything  which  any 
player  might  wish  to  be,  and  Eversley  had  been 
kind.  I  would  pray  to  Eversley.  All  a.t  once  there 
flashed  across  the  blank  of  my  mind,  his  name  in 
letters  of  red.  That  was  it!  That  was  the  name  on 
the  billboards!  Eversley  was  in  town.  I  recalled 
that  Griff  had  spoken  of  it.  I  hadn't  been  able  to 
spare  a  penny  for  a  paper  for  a  long  time,  or  I  should 
have  known  it.  I  would  see  Eversley.  I  got  up  and 
groped  around  in  the  cupboard  for  a  piece  of  dry 
bread  and  ate  it.  Then  I  went  back  to  bed  and 
dropped  asleep  suddenly  with  the  release  of  tension. 
To-morrow  I  would  see  Eversley. 

Griffin  failed  to  understand  my  ehangfe  of  mood  in 
the  morning. 

"You  aren't  afraid  that  I  shall  try  to  hold  you?" 

"No  I'm  not  afraid." 

"Or  that  anybody  will  find  it  out?" 


356  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"I  shouldn't  care  if  they  did,"  I  told  him.  "I'm 
going  to  see  Eversley.  I  suppose  it's  fair  to  tell  you, 
you'll  be  the  last  resort,  Griff." 

"I'll  be  the  foundation  of  your  fortune,  if  Eversley 
will  let  me,  but  he  won't."  I  think  there  was  re 
gret  in  his  voice,  but  it  was  never  in  anything  he 
said  to  me. 

"I  know  you're  not  mean,  Griff;  that's  why  I  told 
you." 

"Oh,  I'll  tell  you,  too.  I  was  mean  once;  I  didn't 
mean  to  be,  but  it  turned  out  that  way. "  He  was  on 
the  point  of  admitting  something  to  me  that  I  felt  if 
I  was  to  depend  upon  him  I  shouldn't  hear. 

I  got  out  as  early  as  possible  and  walked  until  I 
found  a  billboard.  Eversley  was  at  the  Playhouse; 
he  had  been  playing  here  for  three  days.  I  walked 
past  it  several  times  considering  the  possibility  of 
getting  his  address  from  the  stage  doorman,  though 
I  knew  I  couldn't. 

It  was  clear  and  bright,  few  people  moved  in  the 
street.  I  walked  between  the  alleyways  and  a  row 
of  ash-cans  waiting  for  the  belated  carts  of  the 
cleaners.  "Eversley,  Eversley!"  I  called  over  and 
over  as  if  it  had  been  a  charm.  Suddenly  in  the  still 
cold  brightness,  a  torn  fragment  of  newspaper  flapped 
in  the  ash-can,  it  lifted  and  made  a  clumsy  flight  like 
a  half -fledged  bird  and  dropped  beside  me.  Its  one 
torn  wing  flapped  gently  as  I  passed  it,  and  showed 
me  part  of  a  pictured  face.  I  said  to  myself  that  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  357 

was  in  a  pretty  state  when  even  a  torn  face  in  a  paper 
looked  like  Eversley.  I  had  gone  on  three  steps,  and 
suddenly  I  stopped.  It  was  Eversley,  of  course; 
his  picture  would  be  in  the  papers.  I  went  back  and 
lifted  the  printed  scrap.  It  was  part  of  an  interview 
with  the  great  tragedian,  three  days  old,  but  it  told 
me  the  address  of  his  hotel. 

It  was  nearly  eleven  when  I  arrived  there.  The 
foyer  was  crowded  with  people  among  whom  I 
fancied  I  recognized  several  of  my  profession. 
They  had  the  same  desperate  air  that  I  knew  must 
stand  out  on  me.  I  thought  the  clerk  recognized 
it. 

"Mr.  Eversley  is  not  in  this  morning,"  I  was  told, 
They  pretended,  too,  not  to  know  when  he  would  be 
in.  I  understood  that  this  meant  that  he  was  in,  but 
probably  asleep  or  breakfasting.  I  found  a  chair 
close  to  one  of  the  elevators  and  waited.  The  room 
was  warm  and  I  was  faint.  I  do  not  know  how  long 
I  sat  there;  I  must  have  been  almost  unconscious. 
Suddenly  I  snapped  alert.  There  was  Eversley  and 
two  or  three  others  stepping  into  the  elevator  on  the 
opposite  side  of  the  room.  I  was  too  late  of  course 
to  catch  them. 

"Mr.  Eversley's  apartments,"  I  said  to  the 
elevator  boy. 

"First  turn  to  the  left,"  he  told  me  when  he  had 
let  me  out  on  the  fourth  floor.  I  was  afraid  to  ask 
the  number  of  the  room  lest  he  should  suspect  me  of 


358  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

intruding.  There  were  five  or  six  doors  down  the 
left  corridor.  I  knocked  at  one  at  a  hazard,  and 
was  rejected  by  a  large  woman  in  deshabille.  I  was 
discouraged;  somehow  the  prospect  of  knocking  at 
every  one  of  those  doors  and  inquiring  for  Mr. 
Eversley  daunted  me.  I  was  dividing  between  my 
dread  of  that  and  a  still  greater  dread,  if  I  should  be 
found  loitering  too  long  in  the  corridor,  of  being  taken 
for  a  suspicious  person.  In  a  few  moments,  however, 
a  woman  came  out  of  one  of  the  doors  farthest  down 
and  moved  toward  me.  I  thought  it  was  she  I 
had  seen  getting  into  the  elevator  with  Mr.  Eversley; 
she  had  the  gracious  air  of  women  who  know  them 
selves  relied  upon.  She  stopped,  hypnotized  by  my 
evident  wish  to  speak  to  her. 

"Mrs.  Eversley?"  She  acknowledged  it.  "I  am 
trying  to  find  your  husband;  I  have  his  permission," 
I  interpolated  as  I  saw  her  pleasant,  open  counte 
nance  close  upon  me.  I  learned  afterward  how  much 
of  her  life  went  to  saving  him  the  strain  of  publicity, 
and  I  did  not  blame  her. 

"My  husband  never  sees  visitors  in  the  morning." 

"If  you  would  show  him  this  card,"  I  begged. 
"Perhaps  he  would  make  an  appointment."  She 
recognized  the  writing  on  the  card,  and  I  saw  her 
relenting.  Mr.  Eversley,  it  proved,  would  see  me. 

He  pretended  kindly  to  have  recognized  me  at 
once,  but  he  didn't  ask  after  the  Har dings.  He  saw 
that  it  was  the  last  lap  with  me. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  859 

My  dear  Miss  Lattimore,  sit  here.    Now,  tell 


me." 


"So,"  I  concluded  at  the  end  of  half  an  hour,  "I 
thought  you  could  tell  me  if  it  is  all  gone.  If  I  am 
never  to  have  it  back  again,  I  can  go  with  a  musical 
comedy."  I  hadn't  told  him,  of  course,  what  the 
conditions  were  of  my  having  even  that,  "but  if  you 
think  it  could  be  brought  back  again  ...  "I  could 
hardly  formulate  a  hope  beyond  that. 

"Never  in  the  old  way,"  he  answered  promptly. 
"  You  wouldn't  wish  that.  What  you  did  at  twenty 
you  must  not  wish  to  do  at  thirty,  for  then  there  is  no 
growth.  What  do  you  really  feel  about  it?" 

"I  feel,"  I  said,  "as  if  I  could  do  something  — 
something  pressing  to  be  done,  but  somehow  dif 
ferent,  so  different  that  I  do  not  know  how  to  de 
scribe  it  to  anybody  nor  to  get  them  to  believe  in  it." 

"And  so  you  have  begun  to  doubt  it  yourself?" 

"I  shall  believe  you,"  I  said. 

He  sat  still  after  that  for  a  while,  staring  into  the 
open  fire  and  rubbing  his  fine  expressive  hands 
together  in  a  meditative  way.  It  was  good  to  me 
to  see  him,  just  touched  mellowly  with  age,  the 
delicate  carving  in  his  face  of  nobility  and  gentleness. 
There  were  men  like  that  then,  men  who  made,  by 
their  mere  being,  something  more  than  a  shibboleth  of 
the  traditional  dependability.  He  seemed  to  be  far 
away  from  me,  groping  around  the  root  of  truth  in 
respect  to  that  gift  with  which  he  was  so  richly 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

endowed.  He  rose  presently  and  took  a  play-book 
which  lay  face  downward  on  the  table. 

"Could  you  do  a  bit  of  this  with  me?"  he  sug 
gested.  '"It  will  help  me  get  my  lines. "  The  play 
was  "Magda,"  new  then  on  the  American  stage. 
Eversley  was  getting  up  the  part  of  Colonel  Schwartz. 
He  explained  the  story  to  me  a  little  and  I  began 
reading  and  prompting  him.  Presently  I  felt  the 
familiar  click  of  myself  sliding  into  the  part.  All  my 
winter  in  Chicago  rose  up  in  the  part  of  Magda 
to  protest  against  the  judgment  of  Taylorville. 

I  knew  better  too  than  to  attempt  any  sort  of 
staginess  with  Eversley;  I  said  the  words,  trying  to 
understand  them,  and  let  the  part  have  its  way  with 
me.  It  was  not  until  we  had  laid  down  the  book  that 
I  remembered  I  was  still  waiting  judgment,  and  did 
not  feel  to  want  it. 

"I  won't  take  up  any  more  of  your  time,"  I 
suggested.  "You  have  been  very  good  to  me."  I 
got  up  to  go.  After  all  what  was  there  that  Eversley 
could  do  for  me. 

"Well,"  he  said,  "and  is  it  to  be  musical  comedy?" 

"No, "  I  told  him,  "no,  it  may  be  starvation  or  the 
lake,  but  I'll  not  let  myself  down  like  that  ....  Was 
that  why  you  asked  me  to  do  the  part?"  I  said  after  a 
while,  in  which  he  had  sat  gazing  into  the  fire  without 
taking  any  note  of  my  standing. 

"Sit  down,"  he  said.  "Have  you  ever  heard  of 
Polatkin?" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  361 

I  shook  my  head  and  sat  provisionally  on  the  edge 
of  my  chair. 

"Polatkin  is  a  speculator;  he  speculates  in  ability. 
I  think  on  the  whole  the  best  thing  I  can  do  for  you 
is  to  introduce  you  to  Polatkin. " 

Mr.  Eversley  thought  of  Morris  Polatkin  because  he 
had  met  him  the  day  before  in  Chicago.  Before  I  left 
the  hotel  it  was  arranged  that  I  was  to  see  him  the 
next  day,  and  if  he  liked  me  —  by  the  tone  in  which 
Mark  Eversley  spoke  of  him  I  knew  that  was  fore 
gone  —  he  would  take  me  on  to  New  York  with  him 
and  put  my  gift  on  a  paying  basis. 

So  suddenly  had  the  release  from  strain  come  that 
I  found  myself  toppling  over  my  own  resistance.  I 
went  out  in  the  street  and  walked  about  until  re 
minded  by  the  gnawing  in  my  stomach,  that  I  had 
had  nothing  but  the  brewing  of  my  twice-boiled 
coffee  grounds  for  breakfast,  I  turned  into  the  first 
attractive  cafe  and  paid  out  almost  my  last  cent  for 
a  comforting  luncheon.  It  would  have  gone  farther 
if  I  had  bought  food  and  cooked  it  at  home,  but  I 
was  past  that.  I  had  pinched  and  endured  to  the 
last  pitch;  I  could  no  more.  And  besides  the  assur 
ance  of  Mark  Eversley,  which  as  yet  I  could  scarcely 
believe  in,  there  had  come  a  strange  new  courage 
upon  me.  For  as  I  had  suffered  and  struggled  with 
Magda,  suddenly  from  some  high  unknowable 
source,  power  descended.  I  had  felt  it  fluttering  low 
like  a  dove,  hovering  over  me;  it  had  perched  on  my 


362  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

spirit.  I  could  feel  it  there  now  brooding  about  me 
with  singing  noises.  It  had  come  back !  I  rushed  to 
meet  it  as  to  a  lover. 

As  I  walked  back  to  my  lodging,  a  flood  of  hopes, 
half  shapes  of  conquests  and  surmises,  bore  me  like  a 
widening  flood  apart  from  all  that  the  last  few 
months  stood  for.  Suddenly  at  the  door  I  realized 
how  far  it  had  carried  me  from  Griffin;  the  figure  of 
him  was  faint  in  my  mind  as  one  seen  from  the 
farther  shore.  I  considered  a  little  and  then  I  wrote 
him  a  note  and  slipped  it  under  the  door.  I  went  out 
again,  and  walked  aimlessly  all  the  rest  of  the  after 
noon,  and  when  it  was  dark  I  stole  softly  up  to  my 
room  again,  but  he  heard  me.  He  came  knocking 
almost  immediately,  full  of  the  appearance  of  rejoic 
ing,  but  even  the  dusk  didn't  conceal  from  me  that 
embarrassment  was  on  him.  He  looked  checked 
and  confounded  as  when  he  had  told  me  about  his 
relation  to  Miss  Dean,  like  a  man  caught  in  an  unwar 
rantable  assumption.  Whatever  Dean  had  done 
to  him,  it  had  broken  the  back  of  his  egotism  com 
pletely.  He  knew  well  enough  he  had  no  business 
with  a  woman  like  me,  a  friend  of  Mark  Eversley's, 
and  he  was  ashamed  to  have  been  caught  thinking 
he  had.  He  sidled  and  fluttered  for  an  interval, 
making  up  his  mind  to  a  resumption  of  affectionate- 
ness,  and  finally  making  it  up  that  he  couldn't, 
and  remembering  an  engagement  somewhere  for  the 
evening. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  363 

It  was  about  eleven  of  the  next  day  that  I  had  a 
note  from  Eversley  to  come  to  his  rooms  to  meet 
Mr.  Polatkin.  I  went  in  a  kind  of  haze  of  excite 
ment,  numb  as  to  my  feet  and  finger-tips,  moving 
about  by  reflexes  merely  and  with  a  vague  doubt  as 
each  new  point  of  the  way  presented  itself,  the  car  I 
took,  the  hotel  stair,  the  length  of  the  corridor,  if  I 
should  be  equal  to  any  one  of  them,  so  far  was  my 
consciousness  removed  from  the  means  of  com 
munication. 

Eversley  shook  hands  with  me  out  of  a  cloud, 
moving  in  an  orbit  miles  outside  of  my  own,  and 
when  he  left  me,  saying  that  Polatkin  would  come  up 
the  next  moment,  it  was  as  if  he  had  withdrawn  into 
the  vastness  of  outer  space.  In  the  interval  before 
I  heard  Mr.  Polatkin's  knock  I  rehearsed  a  great 
many  ways  of  meeting  him,  none  of  which  were  from 
the  right  cue. 

I  do  not  know  why  I  hadn't  been  prepared  by  the 
name  for  his  being  a  Jew,  nor  for  the  sudden  shifting 
of  the  ground  of  our  meeting  which  that  fact  made 
for  me.  So  far  as  I  had  thought  of  him  at  all,  it  was 
in  a  kind  of  nebulosity  of  the  high  disinterestedness 
that  was  responsible  for  Mark  Eversley 's  interest  in 
me.  It  had  been,  his  generous  succour,  all  of  a  piece 
of  that  traditional  protectiveness,  the  expectation  of 
which  is  so  drilled  into  women  that  it  rose  promptly 
in  advance  of  any  occasion  for  it.  The  mere 
supposition  that  he  was  to  provide  for  me,  had 


364  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

tinged  my  mind,  unaware,  with  the  natural  response 
of  a  docility  made  ridiculous  by  the  figure  of  Polatkin 
edging  himself  in  through  a  door  that  an  arrange 
ment  of  furniture  made  impossible  completely  to 
open.  His  height  did  not  bring  him  above  the  level 
of  my  eyes,  and  as  much  of  him  as  was  visible  above 
his  theatrical-looking,  furred  coat,  was  chiefly  nose 
and  pallid  forehead  disdained  by  tight,  black,  curly 
hair,  and  extraordinarily  black  eyes  which  seemed  to 
have  retreated  under  the  brows  for  the  purpose  of 
taking  council  with  the  intelligence  that  informed 
them. 

I  had  put  on  my  best  to  meet  him,  and  though  my 
husband  had  been  dead  more  than  two  years,  my 
best  was  still  tinged  with  widowhood,  for  the  chief 
reason  that  once  having  got  into  black  I  had  not  been 
able  to  afford  to  put  it  off  for  anything  more  suitable. 
I  had  put  a  good  deal  of  white  about  the  neck  trying 
for  an  effect  which  I  knew,  as  Polatkin's  eyes 
travelled  over  me,  had  been  feminine  rather  than 
professional.  Now  as  I  realized  how  I  had  uncon 
sciously  responded  to  the  suggestion  of  preciousness 
in  the  fact  of  his  coming  to  take  care  of  me,  I  felt  my 
self  grow  from  head  to  foot  one  deep  suffusing  red. 
It  comes  out  for  me  in  retrospect  how  near  I  was  to 
the  situation  which  had  intrigued  Cecelia  Brune  and 
her  kind,  put  at  disadvantage,  not  by  a  monetary 
obligation  so  much  as  by  the  inevitable  feminine 
reaction  toward  the  source  of  care  and  protection. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  365 

At  the  time,  however,  I  was  concerned  to  keep  the 
stodgy  little  Jew,  who  stood  hat  in  hand  taking  stock 
of  me,  from  discovering  that  I  had  come  to  this  meet 
ing  with  a  degree  of  personal  expectation  which  I 
should  have  resented  in  him.  I  hoped  indeed  that 
my  blush  might  pass  with  him  for  a  denial  of  the  very 
thing  it  confessed,  or  at  least  for  mere  shyness  and 
gaucherie.  I  was  helped  from  my  confusion  by  the 
realization  that  Mr.  Polatkin  was  not  so  much  look 
ing  at  me  or  speaking  to  me,  as  projecting  me  into  the 
future  and  gauging  me  against  a  background  of  his 
own  creation. 

I  was  standing  still,  after  we  had  got  through  some 
perfunctory  civilities,  for  I  thought  he  would  want 
me  to  act  for  him  —  but  I  found  afterward  that  he 
had  trusted  Mr.  Eversley  for  my  capacity  —  and  I 
had  a  feeling  of  being  able  to  meet  the  situation 
better  on  my  feet.  I  caught  him  looking  at  me  with 
an  irritating  impersonality. 

"Jalowaski  shall  make  your  corsets,"  he  affirmed; 
"he  makes  'em  for  Eames  and  Gadski — a  little  more 
off  there,  a  little  longer  here  ...  so  .  ..."  He 
did  not  touch  me,  he  was  not  even  within  touching 
distance,  but  he  followed  the  outline  of  my  figure 
with  his  thumb,  flourishing  out  the  alterations  which 
made  it  more  to  his  mind.  "Jalowaski  would  fix 
you  so  you  wouldn't  believe  it  was  you,"  he  con 
cluded 

He  appeared  so  well  satisfied  with  his  inspection 


366  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

that  he  expanded  graciously.  "And  there  is  one 
thing  you  have  which  there  is  lots  of  actresses  would 
give  half  they  got  for  it.  You  have  got  imagination 
in  the  way  you  dress  your  hair.  It  is  a  wonder  how 
some  of  them  can  act  and  yet  ain't  got  no  imagination 
at  all  about  the  way  they  look,  only  so  it  is  stylish. 
For  an  actress  it  is  all  right  for  her  to  look  stylish 
on  the  street,  but  there  are  times  when  she  has  to 
look  otherways  on  the  stage;  y 'understand  me." 

I  slid  somehow  into  a  chair;  I  don't  know  exactly 
what  I  expected,  but  it  certainly  hadn't  been  this 
appraisement,  which  I  had  the  sense  to  see  was 
favourable,  and  yet  resented.  ' 

"The  first  thing  we  will  see  to  yet,  is  some  clothes; 
for  you  will  excuse  me,  Miss  Lattimore,  but  what 
you  are  wearing  don't  show  you  off  at  all.  You 
don't  need  to  wear  black.  Of  course  I  know  you  are 
a  widow,  Mr.  Eversley  was  telling  me,  but  there  are 
some  actresses  what  make  out  like  they  was,  because 
they  think  it  becomes  them,  y'  understand,  but  there 
is  no  need  for  you  to  wear  it,  for  Mr.  Eversley  is 
telling  me  that  your  husband  is  dead  more  than  two 
years  already."  He  had  loosened  his  coat  to  dis 
play  an  appropriate  amount  of  gold  fob  dependent 
over  a  small  balloon  in  the  process  of  being  inflated; 
now  from  somewhere  in  his  inner  recess  he  produced 
a  folded  paper. 

"It  is  better  we  have  a  contract  from  the  start. 
Though  of  course  it  is  all  right  if  Mr.  Eversley  recom- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  367 

mends  you,  but  it  is  better  we  don't  have  misunder 
standings.  "  He  spread  the  paper  out  and  weighted 
it  with  one  of  his  pudgy  hands. 

"So  you  are  going  to  take  me  .  .  .  you  haven't 
seen  me  act  yet." 

"Eversley  has." 

"Well  .  .  .  if  you  want  to  take  his  judgment  .  .  . 
but  he  hasn't  told  me  anything  about  you  yet. 
What  do  you  want  of  me;  what  are  you  going  to  do 
for  me?" 

If  Eversley  had  told  him  how  desperate  my 
situation  was,  it  wasn't  a  good  move  to  try  to  hold 
out  against  him  now,  it  might  have  given  him  the 
idea  that  I  was  ungrateful,  but  I  couldn't  stand  for 
being  handed  about  this  way  like  a  female  chattel. 
That  Eversley  had  told  him,  I  saw  by  the  expression 
of  astonishment  on  his  face  which  slowly  changed  to 
one  of  amusement. 

"I'm  going  to  save  you  from  starving  to  death," 
he  began,  and  then  as  the  sense  of  my  courage  in  the 
face  of  such  an  alternative  grew  upon  him,  "I'm 
going  to  make  you  one  of  the  leading  tragic  actresses 
of  America." 

'And  what  am  I  to  do?" 

"Whatever  I  tell  you.  Eversley  thinks  you  could 
study  a  while  with  Mrs.  Delamater.  She  is  wonder 
ful,  wonderful!"  He  described  with  his  arms  a  circle 
scarcely  larger  than  the  arc  of  his  cherubic  contour,  to 
show  how  wonderful  she  was. 


368  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"I  should  like  some  dancing  lessons,  too,"  I  sub 
mitted. 

"Do  you  dance?  Ah,  no,  it  is  too  much  to  expect; 
but  if  I  could  find  me  a  dancer,  Miss  Lattimore,  a 
born  dancer!"  He  brought  his  arms  into  play  again 
to  describe  a  felicity  which  transcended  expression. 
"But  they  are  not  so  easy  to  find, "  he  sighed  audibly. 
"We  must  do  what  we  can  already." 

Eversley  told  me  afterward  that  Polatkin  had  the 
soul  of  an  actor,  but  the  only  part  which  he  had  ever 
been  able  to  play  without  being  ridiculous,  was 
Fagin,  and  now  he  was  too  fat  even  for  that,  so  that 
he  took  it  out  vicariously  in  the  success  of  those 
whose  opportunity  he  made.  It  was  the  dream  of  his 
life  to  find  a  real  genius,  a  dancer  or  a  prima  donna; 
I  believe  I  was  the  nearest  he  ever  came  to  it;  and  I 
owe  it  to  him  to  say  that  I  couldn't  have  arrived  at 
more  than  the  faintest  approach  to  it  without  him. 

It  was  that  contract  I  signed  with  him  there  in 
Eversley's  room  which  brought  him  in  the  end  about 
three  hundred  per  cent,  on  the  money  he  advanced 
me,  but  I  never  begrudged  it.  He  gave  me  a  check 
then  and  there,  and  an  address  of  a  hotel  in  New 
York  where  I  was  to  meet  him  within  five  days.  He 
looked  me  well  over  as  he  shook  hands  with  me. 

"You  would  be  better  if  you  would  weigh  about 
ten  pounds  more,"  he  assured  me,  and  I  was  mixed 
between  resentment  at  his  personality  and  thank 
fulness  to  have  even  that  sort  of  interest  taken  in  me. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  369 

I  had  lunch  with  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Eversley  afterward; 
there  was  not  time  for  half  the  things  I  wished  to 
hear  from  him,  but  this  sticks  in  my  memory.  I  had 
put  it  to  him  that  the  meagreness  of  my  personal 
experiences  had,  so  far,  tended  to  the  skimping  of 
my  art. 

"There's  no  question  as  to  that,"  he  told  me,  "but 
it  is  nothing  compared  to  the  effect  that  your  art  will 
have  on  your  experience.  It's  a  mistake  to  let  it 
set  up  in  you  an  appetite  for  particular  kinds  of  it. 
There's  the  experience  of  having  done  without  expe 
rience,  you  can  put  that  into  your  acting  as  well  as  the 
other,  and  you'll  find  it  is  often  the  most  valuable." 
I  was  later  to  find  the  worth  of  that,  but  like  most 
advice,  it  only  proved  itself  in  the  event  of  my  not 
taking  it. 

There  was  not  much  to  be  done  about  my  leaving 
Chicago;  I  had  rooted  there  shallowly.  I  went  out 
that  afternoon  to  tell  Pauline  good-bye,  for  I  wished 
to  avoid  Henry.  It  seemed  a  great  step,  my  going 
away.  There  was  a  kind  of  finality  about  it.  The 
casual  character  of  my  relation  to  the  stage  had 
disappeared;  I  was  about  to  be  married  to  it.  Paul 
ine  cried  a  little;  in  spite  of  there  being  so  much  in 
my  life  that  I  couldn't  tell  her,  I  remembered  how 
long  we  had  been  friends  and  that  we  were  very  fond 
of  one  another.  She  couldn't,  of  course,  quite 
abandon  her  favourite  moral  attitude. 

"You  have  a  great  work,  Olivia,  a  great  responsi- 


370  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

bility.  You  must  remember  that  you  are  the  trustee 
of  a  rare  gift." 

"I'll  take  as  good  care  of  it,"  I  assured  her,  "as 
those  who  sent  it  take  of  me. "  At  the  time  I  believe 
I  felt  that  the  Powers  had  taken  notice  of  me  at  last. 

I  got  away  as  soon  as  possible;  it  seemed  kinder  to 
Griffin.  We  had  been  divided  as  by  a  sword;  he 
knew  now  there  was  nothing  between  us  and  he  was 
abashed  at  the  memory  of  having  touched  me.  All 
that  time  we  had  lurked  behind  the  pressure  of  pack 
ing  and  settling  my  affairs;  we  never  came  out 
squarely  and  faced  one  another.  I  think  some  latent 
manhood  that  had  risen  to  my  need  of  him,  slunk 
back  with  the  certainty  that  I  could  do  very  well 
without  him. 

"You'll  be  sure  and  hunt  me  up  if  you  come  to 
New  York?"  I  urged;  I  wasn't  going  to  be  accused 
of  disloyalty  because  of  the  rise  in  my  fortunes.  He 
shook  his  head. 

"You'll  be  up  among  the  nobs  then."  He  looked 
at  me  for  a  moment  wistfully,  "You'll  remember 
that  I  said  I  wouldn't  try  to  hold  you?"  I  let  him 
get  what  comfort  he  could  out  of  the  generosity  he 
imagined  in  himself  at  that.  Seen  against  the  shin 
ing  background  which  Polatkin's  money  had  made 
for  me,  he  looked  almost  weazened.  "Good-bye," 
I  said,  with  another  handshake,  and  I  set  my  face 
steadily  toward  New  York. 


BOOK  IV 


CHAPTER  I 

I  REALIZE  now  that  it  has  been  a  mistake  to  try  to 
write  the  story  of  my  life  as  a  woman,  as  distinct 
from  my  life  as  an  artist.  Yet  I  was  moved  to  make 
the  attempt  because  of  the  conviction,  arrived  at 
through  years  of  intimacy  with  women  who  have 
made  my  generation  notable,  that  the  life  of  a  gifted 
woman  is,  in  respect  to  the  things  that  are  supposed 
to  count  most  with  women,  always  a  squalid  affair. 

I  have  written  in  answer  to  a  question  which  is 
often  put  to  me  by  sheltered  women,  Why  artists 
have  to  have  different  lives;  why,  for  instance,  can't 
they  turn  themselves  out  uniformly  in  the  Pauline 
Mills  pattern,  sleek,  charming,  impeccable?  Always 
back  of  the  question  lurks  the  inference  that  the  re 
lation  of  art  to  untoward  experience,  is  in  the  nature 
of  an  excuse  rather  than  an  explanation.  They  are 
convinced  that  we  choose,  and  choose  perversely, 
never  that  we  are  chosen. 

Thinking  of  Pauline's  way  with  men  I  can  see  now 
that  as  sure  an  instinct  worked  in  her,  to  select,  out 
of  all  possible  opportunities,  the  one  man  who  could 
give  the  desired  setting  to  her  own  career  as  wife  and 
mother,  as  moved  Olivia  to  the  study  of  voice  pro 
duction  and  phonetics.  And  yet  at  the  time  how  foot- 

373 


374  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

less  that  choice  seemed,  how  unrelated!  The  ad 
vantage  of  Pauline's  choice  was  that  it  fell  in  with 
the  general  expectation,  and  mine  went  against 
it.  Measure  for  measure,  I  probably  made  fewer 
mistakes  than  Pauline  did  in  respect  to  the  things 
which  constituted  my  real  service  to  society.  With 
the  same  high  hopes  and  with  as  clear  an  ideal 
of  personal  conduct,  Pauline  sailed  into  peace  and 
safe  harbour,  but  I  fell  upon  discrediting  trouble. 

For  Pauline  never  had  to  please  anybody  but  her 
self  and  Henry  Mills;  but  I  had  the  world  to  please. 
I  played  to  the  standards  set  by  all  the  great  ones 
of  my  world.  When  I  look  back  I  am  amazed  in 
deed  at  the  unfailing  character  of  the  instinct  that 
guided  me,  the  untutored  feeling  for  technique,  the 
swift  choice  of  the  telling  situation. 

The  first  two  or  three  years  after  I  came  to  New 
York  there  was  nothing  else  awake  in  me.  Polatkin's 
support  cleared  from  my  path  all  those  obstacles 
which  ordinarily  oppose  themselves  to  the  artist's 
first  assault  upon  New  York.  It  was  years  before  I 
fully  realized  the  brazen  ring  of  self-interest  and 
self-exploitation  which  defends  the  American  stage 
from  those  who  would  most  adorn  it.  I  was  to 
come  to  it  later,  and  make  my  contribution  to  its 
undoing,  but  —  thanks  to  Polatkin's  disposition  to 
see  in  me  a  good  investment  for  his  money  —  I  came 
to  it  from  the  inside  and  in  a  better  position  success 
fully  to  combat  it.  For  that  time  I  was  completely 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  375 

taken  up  with  the  mastery  of  my  art.  I  had  my 
great  moments,  lifting,  by  the  mere  knowledge  of  how 
a  certain  effect  was  attained,  as  on  mysterious  wings 
of  power. 

I  was  taken  up  on  high  peaks  of  technique  from 
which  I  beheld  the  glory  of  the  world,  and  walked  in 
deep  vales  of  humiliation  before  the  gifts  of  the  few 
splendid  souls  who  at  that  time  illuminated  the 
American  stage.  But  it  all  came  from  the  inside;  there 
was  no  incident,  no  personal  contact,  nothing  I  could 
tell  you  about. 

By  the  end  of  the  third  year  I  had  made  a  public 
for  myself,  and  friends,  not  only  new  friends  but  old 
ones  drawn  there  by  good  fortune  of  their  own.  I  had 
worked  out  my  obligation  to  Polatkin,  though  I  was 
still  on  such  terms  with  him  as  allowed  him  to  give 
me  a  great  deal  of  advice,  and  for  me  to  call  him 
Poly  in  his  more  human  moments.  I  used  even  to 
go  out  to  his  house  at  One  Hundred  and  Twenty- 
seventh  Street  to  spend  an  hour  with  Mrs.  Polatkin 
and  the  several  little  replicas  of  himself,  of  whom, 
in  spite  of  their  tendency  to  run  mostly  to  nose  and 
forehead,  he  was  exceedingly  proud.  I  was  a  success 
ful  actress,  there  was  no  doubt  whatever  that  I  was  a 
success;  I  would  have  been  able  to  prove  it  by  the 
figure  of  my  salary.  And  often  when  the  house  rocked 
with  applause,  and  I  was  called  time  after  time  be 
fore  the  curtain,  I  would  question  the  high,  half- 
lighted  void.  I  would  look  and  ache  and  cry  out 


376  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

inwardly.  For  what?  Well,  I  suppose  I  knew  pretty 
well  what  I  was  looking  for  by  the  end  of  that  year, 
though  it  wasn't  a  thing  I  could  say  much  about, 
even  to  Sarah. 

Sarah  and  I  had  a  flat  together  on  Thirty-first 
Street.  The  second  winter  we  had  played  together, 
in  a  comedy  Jerry  had  written  for  us,  with  so  much 
success  that  it  was  impossible  that  we  should  remain 
together  long.  To  have  kept  together  two  players 
of  such  distinguished  and  equal  quality  would  have 
been  to  miss  the  lustre  of  achievement  which  they 
might  each  shed  on  a  lesser  group,  wholly  without 
any  other  excuse  for  coherence.  Our  managers,  too, 
contrived  to  get  us  not  a  little  advertisement  out  of 
the  circumstance  of  our  being  friends  and  undivided 
by  success.  There  was,  however,  one  fact  known  to 
us  both,  though  without  any  conscious  communi 
cation,  which  we  would  not  for  worlds  have  made 
known  to  an  unsuspecting  public;  and  that  was  that 
while  I  was  still  on  the  hither  side  of  my  full  power, 
Sarah  had  come  to  the  level  of  hers. 

Sarah  was  always  wonderful  in  what  I  call  static 
parts,  parts  all  of  one  mood  and  consistency.  She 
was  notable  as  Portia;  as  Hermione,  absolute. 
Perhaps  the  greatest  favourite  with  her  public  was 
Galatea,  which,  besides  being  well  within  the  aver 
age  taste,  allowed  the  greatest  display  of  her  bodily 
perfection.  Yet  with  all  this,  Sarah  knew  that  she 
was  nearing  the  end  of  her  contribution;  knew  it 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  377 

perhaps  with  that  prescience  of  the  Gift  itself,  fold 
ing  up  its  wings  for  withdrawal.  I  have  never  been 
able  to  make  up  my  mind  whether  she  abandoned 
her  talent  because  she  had  no  more  use  for  it,  or  if  it 
left  her  because  its  time  was  served. 

I  think  we  arrived  at  this  certainty  about  our 
powers  that  year  as  we  came  together  after  the 
performance,  night  by  night,  Sarah  as  though  she 
had  come  back  from  a  full  meal,  with  a  sense  of 
things  accomplished,  but  I  —  I  came  hungry  — 
always!  Sometimes  it  was  merely  with  the  feeling 
of  interrupted  capacity,  as  when  one  has  left  off  in 
the  middle  of  the  course;  when  I  would  continue  act 
ing  in  my  room,  going  over  my  part,  recalling  others, 
trying  experiments  with  them,  pouring  myself  out 
until  Sarah,  poor  dear,  fell  asleep  in  the  midst  of  her 
effort  to  be  interested.  Other  times  I  would  rage  up 
and  down,  all  my  soul  baffled  and  aching  with  in- 
completion. 

I  do  not  mean  to  say  I  hadn't  taken  a  healthy 
satisfaction  in  what  had  come  to  me,  the  knowledge 
of  being  worth  while,  of  contributing  something; 
not  less  in  sheer  bodily  well-being,  leisure,  beautiful 
clothes,  conscious  harmony  with  my  background.  I 
had  more  feeling  of  home  for  that  little  flat  of  ours 
than  I  had  ever  known  in  my  mother's  house,  or  my 
husband's,  for  the  plain  reason  that  its  lines  and 
colours  and  adjustments  were  in  tune  with  my 
temperament,  as  nothing  I  had  had  before  had  been. 


378  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

It  wasn't  until  I  had  the  means  to  give  my  personal 
preference  full  scope,  that  I  discovered  how  much  of 
gracelessness  in  myself  had  been  but  the  unconscious 
reaction  to  inharmonies  of  colour  and  line.  I  had 
developed,  in  response  to  my  environment,  the  qual 
ity  called  charm. 

And  I  was  a  successful  actress.  I  have  to  go  back 
to  that  to  get  anything  like  the  effect  of  solidity 
which  my  world  took  on  with  that  certainty.  I  was 
developing  too,  as  my  critics  allowed,  and  gave 
promise  of  steady  growth.  I  was  well  paid  and  well 
friended.  I  don't  mean  to  say,  either,  that  I  did  not 
get  something  out  of  being  a  part  of  the  dramatic 
movement  of  my  time,  knowing  and  known  of  the 
best  it  afforded.  I  was  integrally  a  part  of  that 
half -careless,  hard-working,  well-living  crowd  so  en 
vied  of  the  street:  I  knew  a  great  many  notables  by 
their  first  names.  And  all  the  time  I  wanted  some 
thing! 

For  a  long  time  I  thought  it  was  something  that 
would  come  as  the  only  enduring  and  inspiriting 
things  had  come  to  me,  through  my  art.  I  expected 
it  to  arrive  by  way  of  those  tingling  threads  which  I 
spun  out  lightly  from  the  centre  of  my  soul,  and  sweep 
me  with  sudden  fire  to  the  climax  of  all  my  serving 
and  my  seeking,  as  nothing  I  had  ever  been  able  to 
achieve  on  the  stage  or  off  of  it  had  quite  swept  me. 
From  the  first  I  knew  it  as  a  thing  that  could  not 
happen  to  me  from  the  inside,  or  of  myself;  its  su- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  379 

preme  service  was,  indeed,  to  carry  me  beyond  my 
self,  my  little  aims,  my  limitations. 

Thinking  of  it  thus  it  was  natural  that  I  should 
always  be  awaiting  any  new  conjunction  which 
brought  me  other  parts  and  untried  partners  in 
playing  them,  with  sharp  expectancy;  and  so  ex 
posing  myself  to  possibilities  of  such  situation  as  I  had 
run  away  from  with  Miss  Dean  and  the  O'Farrell. 
Never  quite;  for  that  humiliation  had  left  me  wary. 
I  saw  and  understood  in  time,  that  for  the  men  I 
played  with,  the  high  mood  I  panted  for  was  never 
the  leap  upward  of  the  creative  flame,  but  the  pre 
monitory  flicker  before  it  dropped  backward  into 
ash.  Perhaps  it  is  so  with  all  men;  love  for  them,  what 
is  called  love,  is  a  thing  apart  from  work,  a  loosen 
ing  and  letting  down.  But  with  women  love  and 
work  are  all  of  one  piece,  a  star  that  dartles  red  or 
blue  as  it  is  turned  in  the  hand.  If  any  man  had  had 
the  wit  to  want  me  at  the  very  peak  of  my  work, 
if  he  had  wanted  me  because  of  my  work,  seen  me 
glorious  in  the  quality  of  it,"  illumined,  I  might  not 
have  loved  him  in  return  but  I  should  have  consented 
to  him,  I  should  at  least  for  my  work's  sake  have 
been  willing  to  be  loved. 

I  think  to  some  extent  I  was  puzzled  and  vexed 
that  this  was  not  so,  for  I  knew  of  nothing  about  me 
that  I  was  so  worthy  to  be  loved  for  as  my  art,  but 
I  have  come  at  last  to  accept  it  with  too  much  sad 
ness  for  bitterness,  that  her  worth  to  the  world  is 


380  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

not  the  thing  any  man  loves  in  'any  woman.  I  was 
offered  love,  I  was  too  vital  and  high  geared  not  to 
stir  men  in  some  sort;  but  the  quality  of  passion  that 
was  offered  me  then  glanced  off  from  the  outer  sur 
face  of  my  preoccupation  without  touching  the  ach 
ing  centre  of  my  need. 

Of  all  the  incidents  of  this  sort,  the  one  that  came 
closest  to  me,  because  of  the  effect  it  had  of  dis 
turbing  the  balance  of  my  company,  was  between 
me  and  my  leading  man  when  I  was  playing  Maria 
in  my  fourth  season  in  New  York.  He  had  flared 
up  from  the  spark  struck  off  by  a  particularly  fortu 
nate  performance,  and  because  I  had  needed  the  help 
he  gave  me,  and,  prompted  of  a  certain  restlessness 
in  my  own  heart,  had  been  a  little  too  appreciative 
of  it,  fancied  himself  in  love  with  me.  To  be  more 
exact,  I  should  say  he  fancied  myself  in  love  with 
him,  and  when  he  had  discovered  the  purely  pro 
fessional  nature  of  my  need  of  him,  he  had  sulked. 
Somehow  you  can't  satisfy  a  man  in  a  situation  like 
that,  as  a  man  can  satisfy  a  woman,  by  telling  him 
that  he  has  been  an  inspiration  to  you  and  pointing 
the  quality  of  the  work  inspired.  In  spite  of  the  com 
mon  phrase,  it's  the  man  who  insists  on  being  loved 
for  himself  alone,  and  not  for  the  increasing  of  some 
woman's  power  of  achievement.  The  more  I  tried  ex 
plaining  that  to  my  leading  man,  the  more  he  was  hurt 
by  it,  and  ended  by  throwing  up  his  part  in  the  mid 
dle  of  the  season.  I  had  to  talk  it  over  with  Polatkin. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  381 

"It  ain't  so  bad,  the  leading  lady  having  a  liaison 
with  the  leading  man,"  he  threw  out  hopefully.  "It 
keeps  her  limbered  up." 

"Haven't  you  just  said,"  I  protested,  "that  I  was 
never  acting  better " 

"Ain't  you  said  that  you  owed  it  a  lot  to  him?"  he 
appealed.  "Ain't  it  fair  you  should  give  back  some 
thing  where  you  get  what  you  said  you  was  getting 

I  only  mean,  if  you  could  just  jolly  him  along  a 

little Oh,  well  —  we  could  get  that  English 

feller,  I  hear  Frohman  ain't  using  him,"  he  finished 
pacifically.  And  then  after  a  few  minutes  of  dis 
gruntled  rumination,  "You'd  be  worth  a  whole  lot 
more  to  yourself  if  you  was  to  fall  for  some  feller, 
hard/9' 

"The  worst  of  it,"  I  said  to  Sarah,  "is  that  he  is 
perfectly  right."  For  I  knew  now  what  I  wanted. 
The  selfless  moment  that  I  waited  for,  the  sweep 
and  power,  would  never  come  to  me  by  the  way  of 
art;  it  was  to  come  to  the  rescue  of  my  art  by  the  way 
of  all  flesh. 

"It  will  come,"  Sarah  had  faith  for  me.  "Every 
thing  comes  if  it  is  called  hard  enough.  But  you 
mustn't  allow  yourself  to  be  persuaded  by  your 
wanting  it  so  much,  to  take  any  sort  of  substitute." 

"This  is  the  way  we  all  end,  isn't  it?"  I  de 
manded.  "Why  should  I  go  looking  for  an  ex 
ceptional  experience.  We  both  of  us  know  that  I 
shall  never  come  to  my  full  capacity  without  passion, 


382  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

and  I  have  a  notion  that  with  experiences  as  with 
everything  else,  we  have  to  eat  as  we  are  helped. 
And  my  leading  man  is  the  only  thing  on  the  plate." 

"You'd  not  find  him  very  nourishing,  I  think." 
Sarah  humoured  me. 

"Oh,  Sarah,  Sarah,  don't  we  both  know  women 
who  give  and  give  to  the  world  and  never  get  any 
thing  better  than  that.  Don't  we  know  women  of  finer 
gifts  than  ours  who  have  to  nourish  themselves  on 
mere  scraps  and  leavings!  Look  at ." 

We  both  knew,  everybody  in  our  world  knew,  how 
the  most  distinguished  woman  on  the  American 
stage  had  to  put  up  with  the  cold  morsels  which 
younger  women  left  her  of  her  manager  husband. 

What  I  wanted  for  myself  was,  no  doubt,  the  same 
thing  she  had  wanted,  a  sane  and  open  affection 
like  the  Hardings',  or  such  noble  and  extenuating 
passion  as  I  knew  and  appreciated  between  Mark 
Eversley  and  his  wife.  And  though  I  had  been  once 
unhappily  married  and  had  lived  four  years  in  New 
York,  I  still  expected  to  get  it.  The  rest  of  my  story 
has  to  do  with  how,  even  with  this  expectation  and 
this  appreciation,  I  came  to  miss  it. 

Sarah  went  on  the  road  in  January,  and  I  made 
the  mistake,  on  account  of  feeling  a  little  lonely, 
of  going  rather  frequently  to  the  McDermotts*. 

No  one  could  be  on  a  footing  of  any  intimacy  with 
Mrs.  Jerry  without  being  set  upon  by  the  little  foxes 
of  suspicion  and  jealousy  which  gnawed  upon  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  383 

bosom  that  nursed  them.  Connubial  misery  was  a 
kind  of  drug  with  her,  the  habit  of  which  she  could 
no  more  leave  off  than  any  drunkard,  or  than  Jerry 
could  his  sentimentalized,  innocuous  infatuations. 
All  this  comes  into  my  story,  for  slight  as  my  con 
nection  was  with  Jerry's  affairs,  in  my  capacity  as 
confidante,  it  served  to  set  in  motion  the  profound, 
confirming  experience  of  my  art.  Or  perhaps  I 
merely  seized  on  it  objectively  to  excuse  what  was 
really  the  compulsion  of  the  gods.  I  could  have  gone 
anywhere  out  of  New  York  to  separate  myself  from 
Jerry's  affairs;  that  I  should  have  chosen  to  go  to 
London  is  the  best  evidence  perhaps,  that  I  was  not 
really  choosing  at  all. 

It  began  with  my  spending  mornings  in  the  park 
with  Jerry's  children,  who  were  nice  children  except 
for  the  way  in  which  they  continually  reflected  in 
their  attitude  toward  their  father,  a  growing  con 
sciousness  of  slighting  and  bitterness  at  home.  Mrs. 
Jerry  made  a  point  of  her  generosity  in  rather  forcing 
him  on  me  on  these  occasions,  and  on  the  long  walks 
which  I  fell  in  the  habit  of  taking  very  early,  or  in  the 
pale  twilight  whenever  affairs  at  the  theatre  would 
permit  me. 

I  remember  how  the  spring  came  on  in  the  city  that 
year.  I  saw  it  go  with  the  children  to  school  in  a 
single  treasured  blossom,  or  trailing  the  Sunday  trip 
pers  in  dropped  sprays  of  hepatica  and  potentilla 
back  from  the  Jersey  shore.  Soft  airs  and  scents  of 


384  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  field  invaded  the  town  and  played  in  the  streets 
in  the  hours  when  men  were  not  using  them.  A 
spirit  out  of  Hadley's  pasture  came  and  walked  be 
side  me.  But  it  was  not  due  to  any  suggestion  of 
what  there  was  in  the  invading  season  for  me,  that 
Jerry  occasionally  walked  along  with  me,  for  the 
chief  use  Jerry  had  of  the  earth  was  to  build  cities 
upon. 

Jerry  drew  the  sap  of  his  being  out  of  asphalt 
pavements,  and  the  light  that  fanned  out  from  the 
theatre  entrances  on  Broadway  was  his  natural  aura. 
He  had  developed,  he  had  branched  and  blossomed 
in  the  degree  to  which  the  inspiration  of  his  work  had 
been  squeezed  and  strained  through  layers  and  layers 
of  close-packed  humanity;  and  the  more  he  was 
played  upon  by  the  cross-bred,  striped  and  ring- 
streaked  passions  and  affections  of  society,  the  more 
delicate  and  fanciful  and  human  his  work  became. 
His  lean  figure,  now  that  it  had  filled  out  a  little,  was 
built  to  be  the  absolute  excuse  for  evening  clothes, 
and  never  showed  to  such  an  advantage  as  in  their 
sleek,  satiny  blackness,  with  a  good  deal  of  white 
front,  and  the  rather  wide  black  ribbon  to  his  glasses 
which  brought  out  the  natural  pallor  of  his  skin. 
His  hair,  which  he  wore  parted  very  far  at  one  side, 
and  made  to  curve  glossily  to  the  contour  of  his  head, 
was  more  like  a  raven's  wing  than  ever,  and  had  still 
its  little  trick  of  erecting  slightly  and  spreading  in 
excitement,  especially  when  he  was  up  for  a  curtain 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  385 

speech,  and  was,  in  the  way  he  looked  the  part  of  the 
successful  dramatist,  a  good  half  of  the  entertain 
ment.  His  contribution  to  the  occasion  on  which  I 
was  good  enough  to  take  his  children  for  an  outing  to 
the  Bronx  or  Van  Cortlandt  Park,  was  made  by  lying 
flat  on  his  back  with  his  hands  clasped  under  his  head 
waiting  until  I  had  exhausted  myself  with  games  be 
fore  he  was  able  to  take  any  interest  in  me.  I  would 
come  back  after  a  while  and  sit  on  the  grass  beside 
him.  Jerry's  way  of  acknowledging  the  pains  I  had 
been  at  to  amuse  his  offspring,  was  to  pat  one  of  my 
elbows  with  a  hand  which  he  immediately  restored 
to  its  business  of  propping  his  head. 

"Jerry,"  I  said,  "I  am  convinced  that  something 
very  nice  is  about  to  happen  to  me.  Run  your 
hands  over  the  tops  of  the  grass  here  and  you  can 
feel  news  of  it  coming  up  through  the  stems." 

"Well,  at  any  rate  you  can  take  it  when  it  comes," 
he  reminded  me.  "There  won't  be  anybody  to  be 
hurt  by  your  good  times  but  yourself." 

"Jerry,  is  it  as  bad  as  ever?" 

"  So  bad  that  if  she  does  n't  let  up  on  it  soon  I  shall 
do  something  to  bring  on  a  crisis." 

"And  spend  the  rest  of  your  life  regretting  it. 
Besides  there  is  Miss  Doran;  you'd  have  to  think  of 
her."  Miss  Doran  was  a  dancer  with  a  spirit  in  her 
feet  and  a  south  Jersey  accent,  whose  effect  on  him 
Jerry  was  translating  into  quite  the  best  thing  he  had 
done.  It  wasn't,  however,  that  I  cared  in  the  least 


386  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

what  became  of  her  that  I  had  thrown  out  that  sav 
ing  suggestion,  but  because  it  had  been  little  more 
than  a  year  since  Jerry  had  disturbed  the  peace  and 

broken  the not  heart let  us  say  the  organ  of 

her  literary  ineptitudes  —  of  Mineola  Maxon  Freear 
who  had  interviewed  him  once,  and  taken  him  with 
the  snare  of  a  superior  comprehension.  Mineola  had 
advanced  ideas  as  to  the  relation  of  the  sexes,  to 
gether  with  a  conviction  that  she  was  fitted  to  be  the 
mentor  of  a  literary  career,  and  had  missed  the  point 
of  Jerry's  philanderings  quite  as  much  as  his  wife 
missed  them.  With  Mineola  in  mind  and  the  tragedy 
she  came  near  making  out  of  it  for  herself,  I  ven 
tured  on  a  word  of  caution. 

"You  don't  want  to  forget,  Jerry,  that  there's  one 
good  thing  about  your  marriage;  it  keeps  you  from 
making  another  one  just  like  it." 

"You  think  I'd  do  that?" 

"It  is  written  in  your  forehead,  Jerry,  that  you  are 
to  be  attracted  to  the  sort  of  woman  whom  you  have 
the  least  use  for.  The  kind  that  would  make  you 
a  good  wife,  you  couldn't  possibly  love  well  enough 
to  live  with  her." 

"I  could  live  with  you,"  he  affirmed. 

"Then  it  would  be  because  you  have  never  been  in 
love  with  me.  Look  here,  Jerry,  what  does  the  other 
all  amount  to?  If  you  didn't  have  any  one  .  .  . 
like  Miss  Doran,  I  mean  ...  do  you  mean  that 
you  wouldn't  write  plays  at  all?" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  387 

"I'd  write  them  harder  and  I'd  write  them  dif 
ferent.  How  can  a  man  tell?  This  thing  is.  Once 
you  know  it  is  to  be  had,  you  just  can't  hold  back 
from  it." 

"Not  even  if  somebody  else  has  to  pay?" 

"Why  should  they?"  Jerry  sat  up  and  began  to 
pull  up  the  grass  by  the  roots  and  throw  it  about. 
"Why  can't  they  see  that  all  a  man  wants  is  to  do  his 
work?"  I  could  see  at  any  rate  that  he  was  near 
the  breaking  point,  and  I  knew  that  if  the  break 
came  from  Jerry  himself,  it  would  be  irrevocable. 
That  was  what  put  me  in  the  notion  of  going  away 
immediately.  I  had  barely  saved  my  face  with  Mrs. 
Jerry  in  the  Mineola  affair,  and  I  thought  if  there  was 
to  be  another  crisis  I  had  better  clear  out  before  it. 

I  had  put  off  deciding  about  my  vacation  until  I 
could  hear  from  Sarah,  who  was  playing  in  the  West 
and  rather  expected  to  go  on  to  the  coast,  but  now 
the  idea  of  getting  off  quite  by  myself  began  to  appeal 
to  me.  It  was  about  a  week  after  that,  at  Rector's, 
where  I  had  gone  with  a  party  of  players  on  the 
spur  of  the  moment,  we  saw  Jerry  come  in  with  the 
dancer,  and  an  air  that  said  plainly  that  he  knew 
very  well  what  a  married  man  laid  himself  open  to 
when  he  came  into  a  place  like  that  with  Clare 
Doran.  I  watched  them  by  snatches  all  through 
the  supper  before  I  made  up  my  mind  to  send 
the  waiter  to  touch  him  on  the  sleeve  and  apprise 
him  that  I  was  there.  What  deterred  me  was 


388  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  reflection  that  if  it  came  into  Mrs.  Jerry's  poor, 
befuddled  head  to  make  a  case  of  his  being  seen 
there,  the  fact  that  I  had  stood  her  friend  wouldn't 
in  the  least  prevent  her  from  having  me  up  as  a  wit 
ness  to  her  husband's  private  entertainments.  I 
seemed  to  see  in  the  set  of  Jerry's  shoulders  that  he 
expected  that  his  wife  would  do  something,  and  that 
it  would  be  unpleasant.  The  necessity  of  taking 
some  stand  myself,  of  aligning  myself  for  or  against 
Jerry's  connubial  independence,  had  cleared  my  soul 
of  sundry  vagrant  impulses  and  left  the  call  of 
destiny  sounding  plain  above  the  din  of  supper  and 
the  gurgle  of  soft,  sophisticated  laughter.  The  au 
thority  of  that  call,  coupled  no  doubt  with  some  an 
noyance  at  Jerry  for  putting  me  in  a  place  where  I 
had  to  decide  against  him,  led  me  to  break  it  to  him 
there,  rather  than  at  a  less  public  occasion,  that  I  was 
about  to  leave  him  with  his  situation  on  his  hands. 

He  came  at  once  with  his  napkin  trailing  from  his 
hand  and  his  raven's  wing  falling  forward  over  his 
pale  forehead,  as  he  stooped  to  me. 

"I  was  wanting  to  see  you,"  I  said,  as  I  put  up  my 
hand  to  him  over  the  back  of  the  chair.  "I  shall  be 
leaving  the  next  day  after  we  close." 

"For  where?" 

"London,"  I  told  him.  "I  shall  be  in  time  for 
the  best  of  the  theatrical  season  there."  I  hadn't 
thought  of  that  as  a  reason  until  that  moment. 
"Besides  I  am  crazy  to  go;  I  smell  primroses." 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  389 

"Nonsense,  that's  Moet  '85.  Besides,  you've 
never  smelled  them,  so  how  should  you  know?" 
That  was  true  enough;  Sarah  and  I  had  had  six  weeks 
of  Paris  the  summer  before  and  a  week  in  London 
in  August,  where  it  rained  most  of  the  hours  of 
every  day,  but  as  I  said  the  word  I  realized  that 
what  had  been  pulling  at  my  heart  was  the  feel  of 
the  London  pavements  with  the  smell  of  the  dust  in 
the  hot  intervals  between  the  showers,  and  the  deep 
red  of  the  roses  the  boys  cried  in  the  street. 

Jerry  stood  looking  down  on  me,  and  his  face  was 
troubled. 

"I  don't  blame  you  for  going." 

"Come,  too,  Jerry;  bring  the  wife  and  babies," 
Miss  Doran  was  tired  of  sitting  alone  so  long,  she 
stood  up  as  if  for  going.  A  flicker  of  consternation 
passed  in  his  face  between  his  divided  interest  and  a 
suspicion  of  the  reason  for  my  desertion. 

"Look  here,  Olivia  —  oh,  impossible! "  It  was  plain 
that  the  dancer  was  going  to  make  it  uncomfortable 
for  him  for  taking  so  much  time  to  his  good-bye. 
"I'll  see  you  at  your  steamer."  He  clasped  my 
hand  with  a  detaining  gesture.  I  could  see  him  look 
ing  back  at  me  from  the  doorway  as  though  for  the 
moment  he  had  seen  my  destiny  hovering  over  me. 
I  have  often  wondered  if  Jerry  hadn't  provided  me 
with  an  excuse,  what  the  Powers  would  have  done 
about  getting  me  to  London  on  this  occasion. 

I  had  almost  a  mind  the  next  day  to  go  out  to  his 


390  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

house  and  persuade  him  to  drop  everything  here 
and  take  his  family  abroad  with  me.  That  I  did  not 
was,  I  think,  not  so  much  due  to  what  I  thought  such 
a  plan  might  contribute  toward  the  saving  of  Jerry's 
situation,  as  to  the  conviction,  as  soon  as  I  had  de 
cided,  that  whatever  it  was  that  lay  at  the  end  of  my 
journey,  I  was  called  to  it.  I  was  as  certain  that  in 
London  I  would  find  what  I  went  to  seek  as  though 
it  had  been  printed  in  my  steamer  ticket.  I  shut  up 
the  house  and  left  the  key  of  the  flat  at  the  bank.  A 
letter  I  wrote  to  Sarah  crossed  hers  to  me  saying  that 
she  thought  she  would  stay  on  in  the  West  for  her 
vacation.  Two  days  after  the  theatre  closed  for  the 
season  I  sailed  for  London. 


CHAPTER  H 

FOR  a  week,  perhaps,  I  was  content  merely  with  being 
there,  simply  happy  and  human.  I  had  brought 
letters  and  addresses  which  I  neglected.  In  spite 
of  the  excuse  I  had  made  to  Jerry  about  it,  I  did  not 
even  go  to  the  theatres.  I  turned  aside  from  the 
traditional  goals,  to  ride  on  the  top  of  omnibuses  and 
walk  miles  down  the  Strand  and  Piccadilly,  touching 
shoulders  with  the  crowd.  The  thing  that  I  had 
striven  for  in  my  art,  what  men  paint  and  write  and 
act  for,  was  upon  me.  Answers  to  all  the  questions 
about  it  that  I  had  not  the  skill  to  put  to  myself, 
lurked  for  me  behind  the  next  one  of  the  Greek 
marbles  and  the  next.  The  pictures  were  luminous 
with  it.  In  the  soft  spring  nights  it  took  the 
streets  and  turned  the  voices  happy.  It  danced 
with  the  maids  in  the  alleyways  to  the  tune  of  the 
barrel  organs.  Then  all  at  once  I  had  a  scare. 
That-Which-Walked-Beside-Me  seemed  about  to 
take  flight.  I  would  be  smiling  at  it  secretly.  I 
would  catch  myself  in  the  motion  of  saluting  it,  and 
suddenly  it  would  be  gone.  Mornings  I  would  wake 
up  in  Chicago  to  the  old  struggle  and  depression;  I 
would  have  to  go  out  in  the  streets  and  court  back 
mv  iov;  it  fled  from  me  and  concealed  itself  in  the 

391 


392  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

crowd.  I  followed  it  by  the  trail  of  the  first  name  I 
lighted  on  in  my  address-book.  It  happened  to  be 
Mrs.  Franklin  Shane;  I  wrote  her  a  note  and  then 
walked  out  in  Hyde  Park  to  see  the  last  of  the  rhodo 
dendrons,  and  regretted  it.  Mrs.  Franklin  Shane  was 
Pauline  Mills  raised  to  the  nth  power,  which  I  did 
not  fail  to  perceive  was  due  to  Franklin  Shane  being 
Henry  multiplied  by  a  million.  The  acute  sense  of 
values,  which  had  established  Pauline  at  the  centre 
of  Evanston,  had  landed  Mrs.  Shane  at  the  outer 
rim  of  English  exclusiveness.  What  she  would  do 
with  her  time  and  energy  when  she  had  penetrated 
to  its  royal  core,  interested  me  immensely. 

I  had  been  entertained  at  her  house  the  previous 
winter  when  I  had  been  studying  a  play  that  made 
me  perfectly  willing  to  be  exploited  by  Mrs.  Franklin 
Shane,  for  the  sake  of  what  I  got  out  of  it  to  fatten  my 
part.  There  in  London  she  called  for  me  in  her  car 
the  afternoon  of  the  day  that  brought  her  my  note. 
I  don't  remember  that  anything  was  expressly  said 
about  it,  but  it  was  in  the  air  that  Mrs.  Franklin 
Shane  had  arrived,  in  her  study  of  Exclusiveness,  at 
knowing  that  the  younger  members  of  it  were  ad 
dicted  to  the  society  of  ladies  of  my  profession,  and 
meant  to  make  the  most  of  me.  I  thought  it  might 
be  amusing  to  see  what,  supposing  with  me  as  a 
tolerable  bait,  she  could  catch  a  younger  son,  she 
would  do  with  him.  She  was  clever  enough  not  to 
put  the  use  she  was  to  make  of  me,  too  obviously.  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  393 

was  invited  to  an  informal  reception  the  next  after 
noon  in  which  she  found  herself  involved  by  her  hus 
band's  business  exigencies;  I  gathered  from  her  way 
of  speaking  of  it  that  the  guests  were  chiefly  Ameri 
cans  and  that  she  had  made  the  best  of  the  situation, 
extracting  from  it  for  herself  a  kernel  of  credit  by  not 
turning  down  her  compatriots,  now  that  she  was  as 
sured  of  having  the  English  aristocracy  to  play  with. 

The  house  in  front  of  which  a  hansom  deposited 
me  the  next  day  was  notable;  stuffed  full  of  the  trea 
sures  of  four  hundred  years  of  the  selective  instinct. 
One  could  guess  that  the  Franklin  Shanes  had  been 
made  to  pay  a  pretty  penny  for  the  privilege  of  oc 
cupying  it. 

"You  must  really  see  the  Velasquez,"  my  hostess 
had  confided  to  me  as  soon  as  I  had  shaken  hands 
with  her,  and  I  judged  from  the  fact  of  her  not 
mentioning  my  name  to  any  other  of  her  guests, 
that  she  was  saving  me  for  a  special  introduction. 

The  Velasquez  was  very  wonderful;  there  was  also 
an  early  Holbein  and  a  Titian  so  black  with  time  that 
there  was  only  one  point  in  the  room  from  which  you 
could  make  out  what  it  was  about.  I  was  slowly 
making  my  way  to  that  point.  I  had  been  in  the 
house  half  an  hour  and  had  met  but  one  or  two  people 
whom  I  slightly  knew,  when  I  was  aware  of  my  hostess 
piloting  toward  me  through  the  press,  a  black-coated 
male  in  whom  I  suspected  one  of  the  pegs  upon  which 
her  social  venture  hung.  It  occurred  to  me  that  she 


394  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

had  sent  me  to  look  at  the  pictures  so  that  she  might 
know  where  to  find  me.  The  room  was  packed  with 
Americans,  satisfying  in  the  only  way  open  to  them, 
a  natural  curiosity  as  to  the  shell  in  which  the  only 
kind  of  society  which  wasn't  open  to  them,  lived, 
and  the  man  blocking  out  a  passage  through  it  with 
his  shoulders,  was  so  tall  that  it  brought  my  eyes 
on  a  level  with  his  necktie.  There  was  an  odd  free 
dom  about  it  that  set  me  at  once  to  correct  my  im 
pression  of  him  by  his  face,  and  the  moment  I  raised 
my  eyes  to  him  I  knew  him. 

I  could  hear  Mrs.  Franklin  Shane  mumbling  the 
phrases  of  introduction,  rendered  unimportant  by  the 
radiant  recognition  that  for  the  moment  enveloped 
us,  that  burst  around  us  as  a  flame  in  which  our 
hostess  seemed  to  shrivel  and  go  out  in  a  thin  haze  of 
silk  and  chiffon.  I  remember  looking  around  for 
her  presently,  and  wondering  how  she  had  got  away 
from  us.  We  began  again  at  the  point  where  we 
had  left  off. 

"So  you  did  go  on  the  stage  then,  in  spite  of 
Taylorville?" 

"And  you,"  I  pressed  my  foot  into  the  velvet  pile 
of  the  carpet  to  make  sure  that  I  stood.  "You  are 
an  engineer,  I  suppose?" 

"In  spite  of  my  uncle!" 

Somewhere  in  the  next  room  some  one  began  to 
sing.  I  did  not  hear  the  song  nor  see  the  Titian.  I 
was  back  in  Willesden  pasture  and  the  soft  rain  of 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  395 

dying  leaves  was  on  my  face.  I  was  conscious  of 
nothing  but  his  hand  which  he  had  laid  upon  my 
arm  to  steady  me  against  the  pressure  of  the  crowd 
which  swayed  and  turned  upon  itself  to  let  Mrs. 
Shane  through,  to  drag  me  to  be  presented  to  the 
singer  who  was  even  more  of  a  notability  than  I  was. 

There  was  an  interval  then  in  which  I  appeared  to 
be  going  through  the  forms  of  society,  and  going 
through  them  under  an  intolerable  sense  of  injustice 
in  the  fact  that  having  found  Helmeth  Garrett  at 
last,  now  I  had  lost  him.  It  was  one  of  those  occa 
sions  when  the  inward  monitor  is  so  bent  on  its  own 
affairs  that  the  habit  of  living  goes  on  automatically, 
or  does  not  go  on  at  all.  It  went  on  so  with  me  for 
half  an  hour.  By  degrees,  what  seemed  an  immense 
unbearable  throbbing  of  the  universe,  resolved  it 
self  at  the  renewal  of  that  electrifying  touch  on  my 
arm,  to  the  thrum  of  an  orchestra  in  the  refresh 
ment  room.  I  felt  myself  carried  along  by  the  pres 
sure  of  the  crowd  in  that  direction,  but  just  at  the 
turn  of  the  stair  that  went  down  to  it  I  was  drawn 
peremptorily  aside. 

"Come,"  Mr.  Garrett  insisted,  "come  out  of  this. 
I  want  to  talk  to  you. "  There  was  the  old  imperious- 
ness  in  his  manner,  exclusive  of  all  other  consider 
ations.  He  seemed  to  know  the  house.  We  took  a 
turn  through  the  hall  came  out  presently  at  the 
porte  cochere  where  a  line  of  carriages  waited,  sup 
ported  by  a  line  of  skirt-coated  figures  like  little 


396  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

wooden  Noahs  before  an  ark.  I  let  him  put  me 
into  a  closed  carriage  without  a  word  of  protest.  I 
had  not  taken  leave  of  my  hostess;  I  had  not  so 
much  as  thought  of  her.  I  suppose  he  had  been 
arranging  this  in  the  interval  in  which  I  had  not 
seen  him.  The  moment  the  door  of  the  carriage  was 
shut,  we  clasped  hands  and  laughed  shamelessly. 

"You  had  three  little  freckles  high  up  on  your 
cheek,  what  became  of  them?"  he  demanded.  All 
at  once  his  mood  changed  again.  "All  the  years  I've 
been  without  you  .  .  .  !  I  saw  a  picture  of  you  in  a 
magazine  three  years  ago  in  Alaska.  I  came  near 
writing." 

"You  should  have.     What  were  you  doing  there? " 

"Promoting  Engineer,  Alaska,  Russia,  Mexico." 
He  began  a  gesture  to  include  the  whole  round  of  the 
mining  world,  but  left  off  to  take  my  hand  again. 
"The  world  is  round,"  he  declared,  as  though  he 
had  somewhat  doubted  it.  "It  brings  us  back  again 
to  the  old  starting  points. " 

"They're  always  the  same,  I  suppose,  the  places  we 
set  out  from;  but  we  .  .  .we  are  never  the  same." 

"Is  that  a  warning?"  He  looked  at  me,  checked 
for  a  moment. 

"Only  a  platitude."  I  had  thrown  it  out  in 
stinctively  against  his  engulfing  manner,  against 
everything  that  rose  up  in  me  to  assure  me  that 
nothing  whatever  had  changed,  that  it  would  never 
change.  The  life  of  the  London  streets  streamed 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  397 

around  us;  crossing  Piccadilly  Circus  we  were  held  up 
with  the  traffic;  the  roar  of  the  city  islanded  us  like 
a  sea. 

"I  suppose  you  know  where  we  are  going?" 
I  suggested  in  one  of  the  checked  intervals. 

"To  your  hotel;  Mrs.  Shane  gave  me  the  address. 
I  told  her  we  were  old  friends.  You  mustn't  be 
surprised  if  you  find  she  expects  us  to  have  gone  to 
school  together.  I  wanted  to  get  away  where  we 
could  talk."  I  gave  him  an  assenting  smile.  Still 
neither  of  us  showed  any  disposition  to  begin.  He 
took  off  his  hat  in  the  carriage  and  ran  his  fingers 
through  his  hair.  About  the  temples  it  had  gone 
gray  a  little.  Now  and  then  he  gave  a  short  con 
tented  laugh  as  a  man  will,  put  suddenly  at  ease. 

"I'm  glad  you  kept  the  old  name,  Olivia  Lattimore 
.  .  .  Olivia.  I  shouldn't  have  found  you  without.'* 

"You  knew  I  had  lost  my  husband." 

"I  read  that  in  the  magazine.  There's  where  I 
have  the  advantage  of  you."  He  dropped  his  light 
banter  for  a  soberer  tone.  "My  wife  died  two  years 
ago."  We  were  silent  after  that  until  the  fact  had 
been  put  behind  us  by  a  space  of  time. 

I  don't  know  why  London  seems  a  more  homey 
place  than  New  York.  It  has  been  going  on  so  long, 
perhaps,  is  so  steeped  in  the  essential  essence  of 
human  living,  and  the  buildings  there  are  smaller, 
more  personal,  the  mind  is  able  to  grasp  them  to  the 
uttermost.  I  remember  as  we  stopped  at  my  hotel, 


398  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

being  taken  suddenly  with  a  tremendous  awareness 
of  it  all,  the  noble  river  flowing  by,  the  human  stream, 
miles  on  miles  of  homes,  and  the  green  countryside. 
I  was  aware  of  a  city  set  in  an  island  and  an  island  in 
the  sea,  the  wide  immortal  sea  going  around  and 
around  it,  the  coursing  waves  —  I  checked  myself 
in  an  upward  gesture  of  the  arms,  as  though  I  had 
pulsed  and  surged  with  it.  I  caught  in  my  com 
panion's  smile  a  delighted  recognition. 

"Sh  —  "he  said,  "what '11  Flora  Haines  think  of 
you!" 

"Flora!  Oh,  Flora  wouldn't  even  think  about  a 
play-actor.  What  would  your  uncle " 

"He's  dead  now."    He  stopped  me. 

"They  are  all  dead,"  I  told  him,  "all  those  that 
mattered  to  us. " 

We  had  another  mood  when  we  came  to  my  rooms. 
I  perceived  suddenly  what  there  was  in  him  more 
than  I  had  known.  It  was  in  his  manner  that  he  had 
commanded  men.  I  was  pierced  through  with  a 
sense  of  his  virility,  the  quality  that  goes  to  make  a 
male.  I  was  glad  of  an  excuse  to  put  away  my  hat 
and  wrap,  to  escape  for  a  moment  from  the  effect  he 
produced  on  me  .  .  .  from  inordinate  pride  in 
him  that  he  could  so  produce  it.  The  room  was  full 
of  the  tumult  we  created  for  one  another. 

"Will  you  sit  here?"  I  said  at  last.  I  believe  I 
pushed  a  chair  toward  him. 

"No,  you."  He  must  have  turned  it  back  toward 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  399 

me,  otherwise  I  do  not  know  how  I  came  to  be  so 
near  him. 

"You  know,"  I  said,  .  .  .  "I  never  got  your  letter.'* 

"I  guessed  as  much  when  it  came  back  to  me.  I 
should  have  come  to  you  the  next  day,  but  I  quar 
relled  with  my  uncle.  I  walked  all  the  way  to  the 
railway  station  before  I  remembered.  But  what  had 
I  to  offer  you?" 

"It  was  so  long  ago  .  .  .  ' 

"No,  no,  yesterday."  His  arms  were  around 
me.  "Olivia  .  .  .  yesterday  and  to-day!" 

I  think  I  moved  a  little  to  be  the  more  completely 
engulfed  by  him,  to  lay  against  his  the  ache  of  my 
empty  breast;  all  these  years  I  had  not  known  how 
empty.  We  kissed  at  last  and  Joy  came  upon  us. 
We  loved;  we  kissed  again  between  laughter.  I 
remember  little  snatches  of  explanation  in  the  inter 
vals  of  kissing. 

"All  this  time,  Helmeth,  I  have  wanted  you  so." 

"I  was  on  my  way  to  you.  All  last  winter  in 
Alaska  ...  in  the  long  night,  Olivia.  I  should 
have  come  soon." 

"Oh,"  I  cried,  "I  have  been  drawn  across  the  sea 
to  you.  All  the  way  I  felt  you  calling!" 

"We  had  to  meet  again;  had  to!" 

After  a  time  I  insisted  that  he  should  sit  down. 
"You  haven't  had  any  tea."  I  tried  to  get  control 
of  myself.  I  was  crossing  the  room  to  ring  when 
he  swept  me  up  again. 


400  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Look  here,  Olivia,  I  don't  want  any  tea.  I  want 
you.  God!"  he  said,  "do  you  know  how  I  want 
you?"  All  at  once  I  was  crying  on  his  breast. 

"Oh,  Helmeth,  Helmeth,  do  you  know  you  have 
only  seen  me  twice  in  your  life. " 

"And  both  times,"  he  insisted,  "I've  wanted  to 
marry  you. " 

It  was  two  or  three  days  before  we  spoke  of  mar 
riage  again.  I  believe  I  scarcely  thought  of  it;  we 
had  all  the  past  to  account  for,  and  the  present. 
We  had  moments  of  strangeness,  and  then  we  would 
kiss,  and  all  the  years  would  seem  to  each  of  us  as 
full  of  the  other  as  the  very  hour. 

"Where  were  you,  Helmeth,  the  second  summer 
after  we  met?"  I  had  told  him  of  my  visit  to 
Chicago  and  the  dream  of  him  I  had  had  there. 

"Out  in  Arizona,  carrying  a  surveyor's  chain, 
dreaming  of  you!  Often  when  the  moonlight  was 
all  over  that  country  like  a  lake,  I  would  walk  and 
walk.  I  had  long  talks  with  you;  they  were  the  only 
improving  conversation  I  had. " 

"For  years,"  I  said,  "that  dream  of  you  was  the 
only  thing  that  kept  my  Gift  awake.  Times  I  would 
lose  it,  and  then  I  would  dream  again  and  it  would 
come  back.  I  know  now  when  I  lost  it  completely, 
it  was  about  a  year  before  I  saw  you  that  time  in 
Chicago. "  I  had  told  him  of  that,  too. 

"That  year  I  married."     I  could  see  that  there 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  401 

was  something  in  the  recollection  always  that 
weighed  upon  him. 

"I  didn't,"  he  said,  "until  after  my  aunt  had  told 
me  about  you.  I  went  back  there  when  she  died; 
she  was  always  good  to  me.  You  know,  don't  you, 
Olive,  that  in  spite  of  everything  .  .  .  everything  . . . 
there  is  only  you." 

"Let  us  not  talk  of  it."  I  do  not  know  how  it  is 
proper  to  feel  on  such  occasions,  but  I  supposed  that 
he  must  have  had  as  I  had,  stinging  tears  to  think  of 
the  dead  and  how  their  love  was  overmatched  by 
this  present  wonder.  I  would  have  had,  somehow, 
Tommy  and  my  boy  to  share  in  it. 

I  went  rather  tardily  to  make  my  apologies  to 
Mrs.  Franklin  Shane.  I  hope  they  sounded  natural. 

"My  dear!  you  needn't  expect  me  to  be  surprised 
at  anything  Helmeth  Garrett  does."  She  talked 
habitually  in  italics.  "My  husband  says  that  it  is 
only  because  he  so  generally  does  right,  that  it  is  at  all 
possible  to  get  along  with  him."  I  snapped  up 
crumbs  like  this  with  avidity. 

"  His  wife,  too,  you  must  have  known  her. "  I  hinted. 
This  was  at  the  end  of  a  rather  complete  account  of 
Helmeth's  business  relations  with  Mr.  Shane. 

"Oh,  well,"  I  could  see  Christian  charity  strug 
gling  with  Mrs.  Shane's  profound  conviction  of  the 
rectitude  of  her  own  way  of  life.  "She  was  a  good 
woman,  but  no  —  imagination. "  She  was  so  pleased 
to  have  hit  upon  a  word  which  carried  no  intrinsic 


402  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

condemnation  that  she  repeated  it.  "No  imagi 
nation  whatever.  One  feels,"  she  modified  the  edge 
of  her  judgment  still  further,  "that  so  much  might 
have  been  made  out  of  Mr.  Garrett.  These  self- 
made  men  are  so  difficult." 

"Are  you  difficult  ? "  I  demanded  when  I  had 
retailed  the  conversation  to  him  that  evening. 

"I  suppose  so;  anyway  I  am  self-made.  She  is 
right  so  far;  I  dare  say  it  is  badly  done.  You'll  have 
to  take  a  few  tucks  in  me. " 

"Not  a  tuck.  I  like  you  the  way  you  are.  Oh, 
I  like  you  ...  I  like  you  sol"  There  was  an 
interval  after  this  before  we  could  go  on  again. 

"Tell  me  how  you  made  yourself,  Helmeth.  Don't 
leave  anything  out,  not  a  single  thing. " 

"By  mistakes  mostly.  Every  time  I  had  made 
one  I  knew  it  was  a  mistake  and  I  didn't  do  it  again. 
I  don't  know  that  I'm  much  of  a  success  anyway,  but 
I've  got  a  large  assortment  of  things  not  to  do. " 

"That  was  the  way  I  learned  how  to  act;  filling  in 
behind!" 

"I  thought  that  came  by  instinct.  What  counts 
with  a  man,  is  not  so  much  getting  to  know  how  to  do 
it,  but  getting  a  chance  to  prove  to  other  people  that 
he  knows  how." 

"I've  been  through  that  too,"  I  told  him,  but  he 
was  bent  on  making  himself  clear. 

"I  suppose  I  ought  to  tell  you,  Olivia,  I'm  only  a 
sort  of  scab  engineer.  I  haven't  any  papers. " 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  403 

"But  if  you  can  do  the  work?  Mrs.  Shane 
said- — " 

"Oh,  Shane  will  trust  me;  he's  learned.  What 
hurts  is  to  have  worked  up  a  scheme  to  the  point 
where  it  is  necessary  to  have  outside  capital,  and  then 
have  one  of  the  outsiders  stick  out  for  a  certificated 
engineer.  That's  what  comes  of  my  uncle's  notion 
that  a  man  should  'pick  up'  his  professional  train 
ing."  There  was  the  core  of  that  old  bitterness 
rankling  in  him  still;  he  could  not  yield  himself  quite 
to  consolation. 

"But  you  have  got  on,  Helmeth,  you  got  here." 
What  "here"  meant  to  me  exactly,  was  more  than 
my  lover,  more  than  the  pleasant  room  behind  us, 
the  obsequious  servitors,  more  even  than  the  sleek, 
silvered  river  and  the  towered  banks  that  took  on 
shapes  of  romance  under  the  London  gray.  There 
was  something  in  the  word  to  me  of  fulfilment,  the 
knowledge  of  things  done,  the  certainty  of  an 
unassailed  capacity  for  doing.  We  were  sitting  with 
the  broad  window  flung  open,  the  top  of  a  lime 
tree  tapping  the  sill  of  it  with  soft  shouldering 
touches,  as  of  some  wild  creature  against  its  mate, 
creaking  a  little  in  somnolent  content.  I  put  out 
my  hand  to  touch  his  knee  —  oh,  as  I  might  have 
done  it  if  the  "here"  had  been  the  point  toward 
which  we  had  travelled  together  all  these  years.  He 
laughed  then  as  he  often  did  when  I  touched  him,  a 
man's  short  full  laugh  of  repletion.  He  thrust  out  his 


404  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

knee  quite  frankly  till  it  touched  mine,  and  closed  his 
hand  over  my  fingers;  he  returned  to  what  had  been 
in  the  air  the  previous  moment  with  an  effort.  The 
suspicion  that  it  was  an  effort,  was  all  I  had  to 
prepare  me  for  what  was  about  to  leap  upon  me. 

"Oh,  I've  pulled  through,  I've  pulled  through. 
But  I'm  not  where  I  might  have  been.  And  I'm  not 
rich,  Olivia.  Not  what  is  called  rich." 

"Is  being  called  rich  one  of  the  things  that  goes 
with  —  what  was  it  you  called  yourself — a  promoting 
engineer?" 

"It  goes  with  it  if  you  are  any  good  at  it.  Not 
that  I  care  about  money  except  for  what  it  stands 
for  ...  and  then  there  are  the  girls. " 

"You  have  —  girls."  It  struck  me  as  absurd 
that  I  hadn't  thought  of  it  until  that  moment. 

"I  thought  Mrs.  Shane  would  have  told  you.  I 
have  two.  It  isn't  going  to  make  any  difference 
with  you,  Olivia?" 

"Ah,  what  difference  should  it  make!"  I  was 
apprised  within  me  by  the  haste  I  made  to  cover 
my  consternation,  that  there  was  more  difference  in 
it  than  my  words  allowed.  "Children  of  yours?"  I 
said.  "  So  much  more  of  you  for  me  to  love. "  The 
apprehension  was  whelmed  in  the  possessing  move 
ment  with  which  he  drew  me  to  his  breast. 


CHAPTER  III 

WE  HAD  to  go  back  to  the  subject  of  course,  it 
couldn't  be  left  hanging  in  the  air  like  that.  It  was 
a  day  or  two  later  at  Hampton  Court,  where  we  had 
gone  for  no  reason  really,  except  that  it  seemed  a  more 
commensurate  background  for  what  was  going  on  in 
us,  the  identification  in  each  by  the  other,  of  the 
springs  of  immortal  passion.  We  had  roved  through 
all  the  rooms,  recharged  for  us  with  the  exceptional 
experience,  and  come  out  at  last  on  the  river  bank 
where  there  was  quite  a  holiday  air  among  the  house 
boats. 

Behind  us  we  could  hear  the  soft  slither  of  the 
fountain  in  the  sunk  garden;  the  warm  sun  streaming 
on  us  through  the  filmy  air,  the  flutter  of  curtains  in 
the  houseboats  above  the  little  pots  of  geraniums, 
the  voices  of  young  people  laughing  and  calling  across, 
began  to  steal  across  my  mind  with  a  sense  of  the 
extraordinary  richness  of  life.  Here  was  all  the 
stuff  of  which  I  had  built  up  my  earliest  dreams  of  the 
Shining  Destiny  .  .  .  young  people  growing  up  about 
me  .  .  .  room  to  stretch  my  capacity  to  the  utter 
most  .  .  .  the  orderly  social  procedure.  For  the 
moment  I  believed  that  I  might  turn  back  on  that 
path  my  feet  had  failed  in,  and  find  in  it  all  that  I  had 

405 


406  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

missed.  I  recalled  that  there  were  always  children 
in  my  dream.  For  the  instant  they  were  back  .  .  . 
little  heads  and  faces  .  ..  all  the  eyes  on  me  .  .  .  soft 
curls,  like  wisps  of  gossamer.  I  suppose  there  must 
be  such  little  unclaimed  souls  forever  hovering  and 
flitting,  little  winged  things,  to  love's  mighty  candle. 
What  should  there  be  in  the  touch  of  a  man's  hand 
on  a  woman's  that  they  should  come  crowding  to  it 
like  homing  doves? 

There  was  a  maid  going  by  with  her  charge,  one  of 
those  glowing  fair-haired  English  children  who  sup 
ply  us  with  the  images  by  which  we  prefigure  the 
angelic  choirs.  Helmeth  held  out  his  hand  to  the 
boy,  and  with  that  swift  spark  that  passes  between 
the  young  and  those  by  whom  they  are  beloved,  he 
toddled  forward  and  laid  hold  of  the  inviting  finger. 

If  I  had  had  more  experience  of  the  pang  that  shot 
through  me  then,  I  should  have  known  it  for  jealousy. 
It  drove  me  on  toward  what,  until  now,  I  had 
avoided. 

"Tell  me  about  your  girls,  Helmeth."  He  felt 
in  the  pocket  of  his  coat. 

"If  you  would  care  to  see  them "  He  was  so 

pleased  and  shy,  I  suppose  he  must  have  understood 
better  than  I  how  it  was  with  me.  "They  are  with 
an  aunt  in  Los  Angeles;  it  was  handier  for  me  to  see 
them  when  I  ran  up  from  Mexico.  They  are  rather 
decent  kiddies.  You'll  see  them  when  they  come  to 
New  York  this  winter." 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  407 

"Shall  you  be  in  New  York?"  It  struck  coldly  on 
me  that  he  should  speak  of  plans  that  seemed  to  be 
going  on  regardless  of  the  extraordinary  interruption 
of  our  love. 

"Until  I  get  this  Mexican  scheme  on  its  feet  I 
shall  be  going  back  and  forth." 

"They  look  like  their  mother,"  I  suggested.  I 
was  looking  still  at  the  small,  rather  pale  photo 
graphs  he  had  handed  me. 

"Because  they  look  so  little  like  me?" 

"You  forget  I  saw  her  once,  in  Chicago." 

"I  remember.  You  know,  I  think  I  went  there 
that  time  because  I  heard  you  were  playing  there." 
He  was  silent  a  moment,  pitching  bits  of  sod  into 
the  river.  "There  is  something  that  manages  these 
things.  If  I  had  met  you  then  we  couldn't  have  been 
like  this.  And  we  might  never  have  met  again. " 

When  he  said  "like  this,"  he  had  touched  my 
knee  with  his  hand  with  that  possessive  intimacy 
with  which  a  man  may  touch  his  own  woman.  I  had 
to  go  back  to  the  photographs  of  the  children  to  save 
myself  from  the  blinding  lightning  of  his  eyes. 

"Are  they  like  their  mother?" 

"I  suppose  so.  I  hope  so  —  she  was  a  good 
woman." 

"I'm  sure  of  that."    He  sat  up  with  intention. 

"Ah,  it  isn't  just  a  sense  of  what  is  due  her  that 
makes  me  say  that.  She  was  thoroughly  good. 
When  I  met  her  out  in  Idaho  she  was  my  chief's 


408  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

daughter  and  the  only  nice  girl  in  the  place.  She 
wasn't  what  you  are  —  no  other  woman  is  —  but 
she  was  one  of  those  plain,  quiet  women  that  have  a 
kind  of  a  grip  on  Tightness.  There  was  nothing 
could  make  her  let  go. " 

"My  mother  was  like  that.  I  think  I  can  under 
stand." 

"Well,  it  was  mighty  good  for  me.  I'm  a  bad  lot, 
I  suppose.  I  always  want  things  harder  than  most, 
and  I  think  the  wanting  justifies  me  in  getting  them, 
but  she  taught  me  better.  She  did  things  to  me  that 
made  me  fit  for  you,  and  I  don't  want  us  to  forget 
that." 

"Oh,  my  dear,  it  is  I  who  am  not  fit." 

But  I  could  see  he  did  not  believe  that.  He  had 
come  upon  me  that  day  in  the  woods  when  happily 
the  mood  of  Perdita  had  shut  round  the  odd,  blunder 
ing  Olivia  like  an  enchanter's  bubble,  through  which 
iridescent  surfaces  he  was  always  to  see  me;  and  by 
the  mere  act  of  loving  he  had  fixed  me  in  my  happiest 
moment.  He  was  the  only  man  I  ever  knew,  whom 
I  could  handle  like  an  audience,  perhaps  he  was  the 
only  man  who  never  knew  me  in  any  other  character 
than  the  lady  of  romance. 

We  went  that  evening  to  see  Beerbohm  Tree  in  a 
Shakespearian  piece,  always  so  much  more  worth 
while  in  London  than  anything  the  same  people  can 
do  on  any  other  soil,  as  if  the  play  had  mellowed 
there  by  all  the  rich  life  it  tapped  with  its  four- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  409 

hundred-year  roots.  Borne  up  by  my  mood  and  the 
beauty  of  the  production,  so  much  greater  than  any 
thing  we  could  manage  in  New  York  at  that  time,  I 
was  chanting  bits  of  it  all  the  way  home,  and  when 
we  came  to  my  room  again  I  moved  before  him  in  the 
part  of  Egypt's  queen. 

"Who's  born  the  day 
When  I  forget  to  send  to  Antony 
Shall  die  a  beggar " 

"Oh,  Helmeth,  if  you  could  just  see  me  do  it!" 
I  was  aching  to  lay  up  my  gift  before  him  as  on  an 
altar. 

"You  shall  do  them  all  for  me  when  we  are  out  in 
the  shack  in  Mexico. " 

"Mexico!"    I  was  blank  for  the  moment. 

"We'll  have  to  live  there  for  a  few  years,  until  I  get 
this  scheme  on  its  legs.  Look  here,  Olivia,  you 
haven't  said  yet  when  you  are  going  to  marry  me. " 

"I've  only  known  you  four  days!"  I  tried  for  the 
note  of  feminine  evasion. 

"Four  days  and  an  afternoon,  to  be  exact.  What's 
that  got  to  do  with  it,  when  you  are  made  for  me?" 

"Don't  you  like  this,  Helmeth?" 

He  caught  me  to  him  with  that  frank  delight  in  the 
pressure  of  his  arm  about  my  body,  the  feel  of  his 
cheek  against  mine  that  was  as  fresh  to  me  as  water 
in  a  wilderness.  "It's  not  this  I'm  objecting  to,  but 
the  trouble  I  shall  have  doing  without  you."  He 


410  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

let  me  go  at  that,  as  though  he  would  not  add  the 
persuasion  of  his  touch  to  what  he  had  to  say. 

"The  truth  is  I've  no  business  to  ask  a  woman  to 
marry  me  for  the  next  two  years.  I'm  pledged  to 
this  Mexican  proposition.  I've  staked  all  I  have  on 
it,  and  I've  asked  other  men  to  put  their  money  in, 
and  I  can't  go  back  on  it.  I  shall  have  to  be  back 
and  forth  between  London  and  New  York  and  the 
mines,  for  at  least  a  couple  of  years.  If  it  wasn't  for 
wanting  you  so  .  .  .but  now  that  I've  found  you 
again,  I  know  there's  no  going  on  without  you!" 

He  turned  his  face  toward  me  that  I  might  see  the 
lines  of  anxious  thought  there,  the  bufferings  and 
disappointings,  and  through  it  all,  the  plain  hunger 
of  the  man  for  his  natural  mate. 

I  saw  that  and  I  didn't  flinch  from  it.  I  took  his 
face  between  my  hands  and  drew  it  down  to  my 
breast. 

"I'm  under  contract  for  the  next  year,"  I  told 
him.  "I  signed  just  before  I  left  .  .  .  what  does  it 
all  matter?  Can't  we  be  just  .  .  .  engaged." 

"We'd  be  engaged  to  be  married.  And  I  couldn't 
take  you  to  Mexico  on  an  engagement." 

"I'm  under  contract,"  I  told  him  again. 

"You  mean  to  say  that  you'd  go  on  acting  after  we 
were  married?" 

It  isn't  worth  while  retailing  what  we  said  after 
that.  It  has  been  said  so  many  times.  It  was  the 
same  thing  that  Tommy  said,  better  put,  more  fully. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  411 

He  was  ready,  you  understand,  to  make  concession  to 
my  liking  for  the  stage,  to  feel  himself  sincerely  a  poor 
substitute  for  what  I  had  got  for  myself  out  of  living, 
but  there  it  was  at  the  end,  that  he  couldn't  make  for 
his  own  work  the  concessions  he  demanded  of  mine. 

"We  would  have  to  live  in  Mexico,"  he  said  at 
last.  "That's  incontrovertible.  And  besides  there 
are  the  kiddies  to  think  of.  Their  mother  wouldn't 
want  them  brought  up  in  the  atmosphere  of  the 
stage. "  He  had  me  there.  I  thought  of  Miss  Dean 
and  Griffin,  of  the  Cecelia  Brunes  I  had  known,  and 
Polatkin  tracing  the  outline  of  my  figure  with  his  fat 
forefinger. 

"I  wouldn't  either,"  and  my  frank  admission  of  it 
brought  us  out  of  the  atmosphere  of  controversy  to 
the  community  of  our  love  again. 

"You  understand,  don't  you,  that  I  feel  even 
more  obligation  to  her  now."  I  nodded.  I  under 
stood  fully  that  inward  conviction  of  disloyalty 
that  came  of  his  having  given  himself  to  what  she 
wouldn't  approve  of,  to  what  he  couldn't  for  de 
cency's  sake  admit  of  giving  her  daughters. 

"I  know  what  people  think  of  the  life  of  the  stage," 
I  agreed;  "and  I  know  what's  worse,  that  most  of 
it  is  true.  Not  that  it  need  to  be;  but  it  has  got  in 
the  habit  of  being  so. " 

"Well,  then,  if  you  feel  that  way "  The 

inference  was  plain  that  he  didn't  know  in  that  case 
why  I  held  on  to  it. 


412  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"It  has  got  into  my  blood,  Helmeth.  I  can't 
explain,  and  I  didn't  realize  until  we  got  to  talking  of 
it,  but  I  don't  believe  I  could  live  away  from  it.  It 
is  with  me  as  it  is  with  you  about  your  engineering. " 
If  I  had  a  momentary  qualm  lest  that  last  should  be 
not  quite  disingenuous,  it  passed  in  the  realization 
that  the  comparison  hadn't  come  home  to  him.  I 
remembered  how  Forester  would  have  accepted  the 
abnegation  of  my  gift  to  his  necessity  of  being  im 
portant,  and  I  didn't  hold  it  out  against  Helmeth 
that  he  failed  to  realize  at  all  the  place  that  my  work 
occupied,  just  as  work,  in  the  scheme  of  my  existence. 

We  came  back  to  it  the  next  day  and  the  next.  It 
would  have  been  simpler,  of  course,  if  it  hadn't  been 
for  the  children,  and  for  my  being  at  one  with  him  in 
the  opinion  that  the  stage  wasn't  the  proper  atmos 
phere  for  the  rearing  of  young  ladies.  I  was  still  of 
the  opinion  which  was  exemplified  in  so  far  as  I 
knew  it,  by  Pauline  and  Mrs.  Franklin  Shane,  that 
the  function  of  mothering  could  not  go  on  except 
by  complete  separateness  from  the  business  of 
making  a  living.  All  my  training  and  heredity  had 
fostered  an  ideal  of  family  life  which  rendered 
obligatory  a  proper  house  and  servants,  in  the 
neighbourhood  of  good  schools,  and  the  exclusion 
from  it  of  everybody  but  those  who  found  them 
selves  in  an  identical  situation.  And  if  we  had  been 
able  to  imagine  a  compromise,  Helmeth  and  I  would 
have  been  hindered  by  the  defrauded  capacity  for 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  413 

I 
loving,  from  working  it  out  logically.    At  the  mere 

suggestion  of  anything  to  drive  us  apart,  the  mating 
instinct  set  us  toward  one  another  irresistibly.  We 
would  leave  off  any  argument  and  fall  to  kissing.  We 
were  pierced  through  and  through  with  loving. 

"Let  us  not  think  of  it  any  more;  something  will 
work  out  for  us.  Let  us  just  be  happy  the  way  we 
are,"  I  would  protest. 

"Oh,  child,  child,  will  you  never  understand  that 
the  way  we  are  is  what  is  so  hard  to  bear ! "  Then  he 
would  snatch  me  up  until  the  suffusing  fire  of  his 
caress  would  steal  through  all  my  body  and  sing  in 
me  like  bacchic  sap  of  vineyards  in  the  spring. 

"You  oughtn't  to  marry  me  unless  you  can't  help 
yourself,"  he  would  laugh  shamelessly.  So  we  fell 
deeper  in  love  and  not  out  of  our  difficulties. 

Toward  the  end  of  that  week,  the  weather  which 
had  been  thickening  to  a  storm,  brought  us  to  one  of 
those  thunderous  London  days,  full  of  a  stifling  murk 
that  might  have  been  breathed  out  by  the  nostrils  of 
the  greasy,  hurrying  snake  that  went  by  in  the  bed 
of  the  river.  Inconsequential  lightnings  flashed  in 
the  smoky  vault,  from  every  quarter  of  which  rolled 
unrelated  thunder. 

Helmeth  came  over  from  Mr.  Shane's  office  in 
London  Wall;  the  need  we  had  of  being  together  was 
oppressive  like  the  day  which,  when  we  had  sought 
it  in  the  Park,  we  could  hear  like  some  great  mon 
ster  bellowing  for  its  mate.  We  went  out  and 


414  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

walked  about  for  a  time  under  the  trees,  fancy 
ing  the  relief  of  freshness  in  the  green  obscurity  that 
under  the  ranked  trunks,  thickened  to  blackness. 
No  one  was  about  but  a  few  belated  nursery  maids, 
scurrying  in  silhouette  against  the  pale  glow  of  the 
light  pinned  down  and  imprisoned  under  the  thick 
cloud  of  foliage.  We  were  on  the  Broad  Walk,  when 
suddenly  a  wind  tore  loose  in  the  firmament.  It  made 
a  whirling  chaos  of  the  murk,  it  wrung  the  treetops, 
but  the  air  along  the  ground  was  stagnant  as  a 
cistern.  Now  and  then  a  few  great  drops  spattered 
on  the  leaves  of  the  limes.  Over  a  quarter  of  a  mile 
from  us,  near  the  Alexandria  gate,  the  tension  of  the 
day  snapped  suddenly  in  flame,  a  bolt  had  shattered 
one  of  the  great  trees.  Straight  across  the  grass 
toward  us  the  bolt  sped  like  a  ball  of  light.  R 
skimmed  the  ground  knee  high,  flame  points  on  its 
edges,  flickered  viciously  as  it  drove  at  us. 

There  was  no  time  for  anything.  Helmeth  cried 
out  to  me  once  and  I  stepped  within  the  circle  of  his 
arms;  we  could  hear  the  fire  ball  sizzling  as  it  cleared 
the  grass;  within  a  yard  of  us  it  went  out  in  a  flare  of 
gas  and  a  crack  like  thunder.  Suddenly  buckets 
of  rain  were  precipitated  on  us,  we  could  hear  the 
slap  of  them  on  the  pavement  as  we  ran. 

I  was  crying  hysterically  by  the  time  we  came  to 
my  room  in  a  cab.  I  remember  Helmeth  trying  to 
rid  me  of  my  wet  things  and  my  clinging  to  him 
crying. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  415 

"Oh,  my  dear,  my  dear,  it  was  so  near,  so  near,  I 
thought  I  was  to  lose  you  before  I  had  had  you  — 
before  I  had  had  you  at  all!" 

"No,  no  ...  not  that,  Olivia,  not  that!"  His 
arms  were  around  me  and  all  my  life  up  to  that 
moment  was  no  more  to  me  than  a  path  which  led 
up  to  those  arms.  I  remember  that  .  .  .  and  the 
world  dissolving  in  the  wash  of  the  rain  outside 
.  .  .  and  the  lift  of  his  breast;  and  deep  under  all, 
old,  unimagined  instincts  reared  their  heads  and 
bayed  at  the  voice  of  their  master  .  .  . 


.      CHAPTER  IV 

AFTER  the  evening  of  the  storm  we  talked  no  more 
of  marriage  for  a  while,  and  about  a  week  later  I 
went  over  to  Paris  ostensibly  to  shop,  and  was 
joined  there  by  Mr.  Garrett  on  the  way  to  Italy. 
I  suppose  that  Italy  must  always  lie  like  some  lovely 
sunken  island  at  the  bottom  of  all  passionate  dreams, 
from  which  at  the  flood  it  may  arise;  the  air  of 
it  is  charged  with  subtle  essences  of  romance.  One 
supposes  Italy  must  be  organized  for  the  need  of 
lovers.  Nothing  occurred  there  to  break  the  film 
of  our  enchanted  bubble.  For  a  month  we  kept  to 
the  hill  towns  and  to  Venice,  where  we  could  go 
about  in  the  conspicuous  privacy  of  a  gondola,  and 
all  that  time  we  met  nobody  we  had  ever  known. 

It  was  all  so  easily  managed  —  we  had  to  think 
of  the  girls,  of  course  —  no  one  seeing  our  registered 
names  side  by  side,  Mrs.  Thomas  Bettersworth, 
New  York,  and  Helmeth  Garrett,  Chili-cojote, 
Mexico,  would  have  thought  of  connecting  them. 
Helmeth  attended  to  all  his  business  correspondence 
as  though  he  were  still  in  London,  and  nobody  ex 
pected  to  hear  from  me  in  any  case. 

It  is  strange  how  little  history  there  is  to  happiness. 
We  had  come  together  past  incredible  struggles, 

416 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  417 

anxieties,  triumphs,  defeats;  we  had  been  buffeted 
and  stricken,  and  now  suddenly  we  were  stilled. 
If  at  any  time  the  ghosts  of  the  uneasy  past  rose 
upon  us,  we  kissed  and  they  were  laid.  So  long  as 
we  kept  in  touch,  there  ran  a  river  of  fire  between 
our  blessed  isolation  and  the  world.  And  for  the 
first  time  we  looked  upon  the  world  free  of  the 
obligations  of  our  being  in  it.  We  looked,  and 
exchanged  our  separate  knowledges  as  precious  treas 
ure.  My  exploration  of  life  had  been  from  within 
—  I  knew  what  Raphael  was  thinking  about  when  he 
painted  that  fine  blue  vein  on  his  Madonna's  wrist. 
But  Helmeth  had  looked  on  the  movement  of  his 
tory;  what  he  saw  in  Italy  was  the  path  of  armies, 
lines  of  aqueducts,  old  Roman  roads  to  and  from 
mines.  Everything  began  or  ended  for  him  in  a 
mine,  in  Gaul  or  Austria  or  Ophir;  dynasties  were 
marked  for  him  by  change  in  the  ownership  of  mines. 
So  he  drew  me  the  white  roads  out  of  Italy  as  one 
draws  fibre  from  a  palm,  and  strung  on  them  the 
world's  great  adventures.  There  were  hours  also 
when  we  let  all  this  great  fabric  of  art  and  history 
float  from  us,  sure  that  by  the  vitalizing  thread  of 
understanding  which  ran  between  us  like  a  new,  live 
sense,  we  could  pull  it  back  again  .  .  .  but  we 
loved  ...  we  loved. 

Nothing  that  happened  to  us  there,  came  with  a 
more  revealing  touch  than  the  attitude  in  which  I 
caught  myself,  looking  out  for  and  being  surprised 


418  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

at  not  discovering  in  myself  any  qualms  of  con 
science.  All  that  I  had  learned  of  such  relations 
in  other  people,  had  made  itself  known  by  a  subtle, 
penetrating,  fetid  savour,  against  which  some  in 
stinct,  as  sure  as  a  hound,  threw  up  its  head  and 
bayed  the  tainted  air. 

But  in  my  own  affair,  the  first  compulsion  that 
irked  me  was  the  necessity  I  was  under  of  not 
telling  anybody.  I  wasn't  conscious  at  any  time  of 
any  feeling  that  wouldn't  have  gone  suitably  with 
the  outward  form  of  marriage;  there  were  times 
even  when  I  failed  to  see  why  one  should  take  ex 
ception  to  the  neglect  of  such  form.  I  was  remade 
every  pulse  and  fibre  of  me,  my  beloved's  .  .  . 
and  so  obviously,  that  the  necessity  of  tagging  my 
estate  with  a  ceremony  struck  me  as  an  imperti 
nence.  Marriage  I  think  must  be  a  fact,  capable 
of  going  on  independently  of  the  prayer  book  and 
the  county  clerk.  Whatever  you  may  think,  no 
god  could  have  escaped  the  certainty  of  my  being 
duly  married. 

There  were  days  though,  just  at  first,  when  I 
suffered  the  need  of  completing  my  condition  by  an 
outward  bond.  I  knew  very  well  where  the  custom 
of  wedding  rings  came  from;  I  should  have  worn 
anklets  and  armlets  as  well,  if  only  they  could  have 
been  taken  as  the  advertisement  of  my  belonging 
wholly  to  my  man.  Depend  upon  it,  the  subju 
gation  of  woman  will  be  found  finally  to  rest  in  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  419 

attempt  visibly  to  establish,  what  the  woman  herself 
concurs  in,  the  inward  conviction  of  possession. 

How  much  of  what  was  in  my  own  mind  was  also 
in  Kenneth's,  I  do  not  know;  but  because  I  had 
brought  upon  myself  the  condition  of  not  being 
married,  I  failed  to  speak  of  what  I  found  regrettable 
in  it.  What  did  come  out  for  me  satisfyingly  was 
the  man's  sheer  content  in  his  mate,  the  response, 
and  our  pride  in  it,  of  his  blood  and  body  to  my 
presence,  and  the  new  relish  it  created  in  him  for 
the  processes  of  living,  for  his  pipe  and  his  meals, 
and  his  work.  He  had  brought  some  estimates  to 
figure  out;  evenings  at  work  on  these,  he  would  call 
me  to  him  and  sit  with  his  left  arm  thrown  lightly 
about  my  chair,  the  pencil  going  as  though  my 
presence  were  an  added  fillip  to  activity.  He  took 
on  weight  in  that  holiday,  and  his  mouth  relaxed 
to  a  more  youthful  curve. 

We  spent  the  last  three  weeks  of  it  at  a  quiet 
hotel  on  the  point  of  land  that  divides  Lake  Como 
from  Lecco,  opposite  Cadenabbia.  Times  yet  I 
will  wake  out  of  dreaming,  to  find  the  pulse  of  the 
city  transmuted  into  the  steady  lisping  of  that 
silver  fretted  lake.  We  had  come  to  a  phase  like 
that  in  our  relation,  deep  and  full  and  shining. 
We  spent  hours  sitting  on  the  parapet  in  the  sun, 
looking  at  it.  I  would  sit  on  the  stone  ledge  and 
Helmeth  would  stretch  himself,  with  his  pipe,  along 
the  ground. 


420  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Helmeth,"  I  said  on  such  a  morning,  "do  you 
know  this  is  the  first  time  I  ever  rested?"  He 
gave  a  little  gurgle  of  content;  the  sun  turned  on 
the  sails  of  the  fishing-boats  and  flashed  us  sympathy. 
"I'm  afraid,"  I  admitted,  "I'm  never  going  to  want 
to  do  anything  else." 

"Oh,  I'm  going  to  want  to.  This  is  good  enough, 
but  it  wouldn't  be  half  so  good  if  I  couldn't  take 
it  along  with  me  and  do  things  with  it  —  great 
things."  He  threw  his  arm  across  my  knees  with 
one  of  those  quick,  intimate  caresses,  flooding  me 
full  of  the  delighted  sense  of  how  completely  I  be 
longed  to  him.  "I  feel,"  he  said,  "as  if  I  had  been 
going  about  with  one  arm  or  one  hand,  and  now  I've 
got  a  full  set  of  them.  Wait  until  I  show  you!" 

"When  you  talk  of  doing,  Helmeth  —  that  means 
leaving  me." 

"That's  for  you  to  say,  Olive."  That  was  as 
near  as  he  had  come  yet  to  reminding  me  that  it 
was  I  who  had  chosen  this  instead  of  a  relation  which 
would  have  implied  my  going  with  him  wherever 
his  work  led  him,  and  that  the  choice  was  still  open  to 
me.  The  night  after  the  storm  he  had  written  me: 


"There  is  nothing  that  troubles  me  about  to-night  except  the 
fear  that  you  may  regret  it,  that  you  might  ever  come  to  have  a 
doubt  of  how  I  feel  about  it.  I  want  you  to  feel  that  whatever 
you  choose  is  right  to  me,  and  though  I  hope  for  nothing  so  much 
as  to  make  you  my  wife,  I  shall  not  urge  you  beyond  what  you 
feel  that  you  can  do  without  urging." 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  421 

It  was  a  generous  letter,  and  no  doubt  it  had  its 
weight  in  persuading  me  to  trust  the  situation,  in 
the  face  of  that  instinct  which  saves  women,  even 
from  passions  that  seem  their  own  justification.  If 
he  had  counted  on  the  naturalness  of  love  to  set 
up  its  own  public  obligation,  he  had  not  been  far 
wrong  with  me.  If  it  had  been  practicable,  I 
should  have  walked  out  with  him  any  day  those 
first  weeks  to  be  married.  But  marriage  is  a  very 
complicated  business  in  Italy.  In  a  measure  I  had 
satisfied  my  fret  for  the  visible  tie,  with  a  ring  which 
he  had  bought  me  in  Florence,  which,  as  the  stones 
flashed  in  the  sun,  turned  me  back  on  the  thought 
I  had  when  first  he  set  it  on  my  hand. 

"Helmeth,  do  you  suppose  that  we  are  pushed 
on  to  make  laws  and  observances  about  marriage, 
because  the  bond  that  comes  into  being  then  has 
a  consistency  and  validity  beyond  what  we  feel 
about  it?" 

"Oh,  beyond  what  we  feel  about  it,  yes."  He 
sat  up  then  a  little  away  from  me,  as  he  often  did 
when  he  drew  upon  experiences  lying  beyond  the 
points  at  which  his  life  had  been  touched  by  mine, 
and  began  skipping  little  stones  into  the  water. 
"Yes,  I'm  sure  that  what  you  feel  about  a  thing  that 
happens  to  you  is  not  always  the  test  of  what  it 
does  to  you.  Sometimes  I  think  feelings  haven't 
much  to  do  with  our  experiences  except  to  get  us 
into  them."  He  left  off  skipping  stones  and  began 


422  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

to  pile  them  into  a  little  heap.  "I  was  thinking 
of  Laura,"  he  concluded.  It  was  not  often  that  he 
spoke  to  me  of  his  wife. 

"I  can't  remember  that  I  had  a  great  deal  of 
feeling  about  her;  I  was  too  busy,  I  suppose,  get 
ting  on  with  my  engineering;  but  she  had  a  grip  on 
me.  She  had  a  grip.  Look  here,  my  dear,  I  ought 
to  tell  you  this,  you're  the  wonder  of  the  earth  for 
me,  and  I  know  very  well  that  my  wife's  world  was 
a  very  little  one;  it  was  bounded  by  the  church  on 
one  side  and  by  conventions  on  all  the  others.  But 
somehow  I  don't  want  to  get  too  far  away  from  it, 
and  I  don't  want  the  girls  to  get  too  far."  He 
swung  about  to  look  squarely  up  at  me.  "This 
that  you've  given  me,  it's  heaven;  it's  a  thing  for  a 
man  to  die  for  and  die  happy;  but  there's  the  other 
too."  He  laughed  a  little  awkwardly;  he  caught 
my  feet  in  one  of  his  strong  hands.  "Have  I  made 
you  understand?" 

"I  understand  that  kind  of  life.  It's  like  a  clean, 
scrubbed  room.  I  know.  I  was  brought  up  in  it. 
There  have  been  times  when  I  have  been  desperate 
because  I  couldn't  go  back  and  live  there.  But  I 
ought  to  tell  you,  Helmeth,  I  can't  find  my  way 
back." 

"You!  Why  should  you?  You  were  made  to 
live  in  Kings'  houses.  But  I  wanted  to  be  sure  you 
weren't  going  to  be  disappointed  if  I  haven't  the 
manners  that  always  belong  to  palaces.  I've 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  423 

been  in  camps  where  a  scrubbed  room  looked 
mighty  good  to  me."  He  stretched  himself  and 
rolled  over  on  the  ground,  lying  with  his  back  to  the 
sun,  soaking  in  it  in  simple,  animal  content.  Little 
white  flecks  showed  on  the  lake,  the  sails  of  the 
fisher-boats  tilted  slowly  and  composed  themselves 
anew  with  the  line  of  the  shore  and  the  flowing  hills. 
Directly  opposite,  the  walls  of  Cadenabbia  showed 
white  amid  the  green,  like  a  little  streak  of  Ar- 
cady. 

"We've  never  been,"  I  reminded  him. 

"I  thought  you  wanted  to  leave  it  so  you  could 
always  think  of  its  being  as  romantic  as  it  looks, 
without  making  sure  that  it  isn't."  That  was  the 
reason  I  had  given  him,  but  the  truth  was  that 
Cadenabbia  was  on  one  of  those  tourist  routes  where, 
supposing  anybody  we  knew  to  be  wandering  about 
Europe,  we  would  be  sure  to  run  into  them.  This 
morning,  however,  I  was  seized  with  an  irresistible 
desire  to  visit  it. 

"But  supposing  it  isn't  as  interesting  as  it  looks," 
I  submitted,  "if  I  go  there  with  you  I  shall  never 
know  it.  And  think  how  disappointed  I  should  be 
if  I  should  ever  come  there  without  you  and  find  that 
it  is  the  one  place  we  ought  to  have  seen. " 

There  was  a  little  motor  launch  plying  between 
the  shores  of  the  lake,  and  an  hour  before  tea  time 
we  crossed  in  it.  We  spent  the  hour  in  the  garden 
of  the  Duke  of  Saxe-Meiningen,  and  then  along  the 


424  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

parapet  we  strolled  in  search  of  tea.  It  was  the 
height  of  the  tourist  season  and  the  gay  groups 
moving  in  the  streets  between  the  quaint  low  houses, 
gave  it  a  holiday  air.  We  heard  them  calling  one 
to  the  other,  exchanging  appreciations  and  in 
formation.  All  at  once  we  heard  them  calling  us. 

"Garrett,  Garrett!"  a  party  in  the  act  of  settling 
at  a  tea  table  in  the  garden  of  one  of  the  hotels, 
dissolved  and  reorganized  about  us  as  the  centre. 
There  was  laughter  and  garbled  greetings  and  hand 
shaking.  Presently  Helmeth  began  to  introduce  me. 
They  were  a  party  of  Calif ornians,  all  more  or  less 
acquainted  and  importunate;  we  were  swept  back 
by  them  to  the  table  and  tea.  There  were  two 
married  couples  and  one  unmarried  woman  of  about 
my  age,  and  a  boy  of  sixteen.  I  could  see  by  the 
way  she  appropriated  him,  that  his  acquaintance 
with  Miss  Stanley  had  been  of  the  degree  that  might 
have  ripened  into  marriage,  and  that  Miss  Stanley 
had  not  wholly  made  up  her  mind  that  it  wouldn't. 
She  was  one  of  those  unmarried  women  who  con 
trive  by  a  multiplicity  and  vivacity  of  interests  to 
deny  what  is  explicitly  advertised  by  their  anxiety  to 
have  you  understand  that  they  consider  themselves 
much  better  off  just  as  they  are.  I  could  see  her 
taking  in  all  the  details  of  my  appearance,  to  find 
the  key  to  what  Mr.  Garrett  might  presumably  like 
in  me,  and  striking  out  in  her  manner  to  him  a 
quick  sketch  of  me,  bettered  in  the  direction  of  what 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  425 

she  believed  it  most  to  be.  The  other  women,  if 
they  had  been  brought  up  in  Taylorville,  would 
have  resembled  Pauline  Mills;  that  they  didn't 
I  could  see  was  difference  of  geography.  They 
were  all  full  of  gay  talk  and  reminiscence  of  a  mutual 
life  in  the  West,  on  a  footing  that  left  me  rather 
more  than  room  to  play  the  part,  which  I  had  cast 
for  myself  with  celerity,  of  being  a  casual  acquaint 
ance  of  his,  picked  up  at  a  hotel.  He  had  introduced 
me  to  them  as  Mrs.  Betters  worth,  and  whether  they 
would  have  known  me  or  not  by  my  stage  name,  I 
took  care  they  shouldn't  have  the  opportunity. 

Nothing  would  do  but  he  must  stay  to  dinner; 
I  guessed  that  there  was  that  degree  of  acquaintance 
between  them  which  would  have  made  it  unfriendly 
of  him  to  refuse.  I  could  see  Miss  Stanley  prick  up 
at  his  manner  of  leaving  the  decision  to  me,  and 
realized  that  whatever  we  might  have  agreed  upon, 
there  would  be  no  keeping  our  relation  from  being  at 
least  a  matter  of  curiosity  to  the  women,  the  elder  of 
whom  had  promptly  included  me  in  the  invitation. 

I  invented  a  mythical  travelling  companion  across 
the  lake  whom  I  must  join,  and  managed  to  make 
my  being  in  Mr.  Garrett's  company  appear  so  casual 
that  I  came  near  to  overdoing  it  by  exciting  his 
concern. 

"What's  the  matter;  don't  you  like  them?"  He 
wished  to  know  as  he  saw  me  to  the  landing. 

"Ever    so,"    I    insisted    promptly,    "but    they 


426  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

wouldn't  like  me  after  a  while.  You  behave  as  if 
we  had  been  married  five  years." 

"Oh,  well,  haven't  we?"  He  looked  back  and 
his  brow  gathered  a  little.  "For  two  cents  I'd  tell 
them."  But  after  all  there  was  nothing  he  could  do 
but  see  me  comfortably  off  and  go  back  to  them. 
He  told  me  afterward  that  Mr.  Harwood,  the  elder 
of  the  two  gentlemen,  had  been  useful  to  him  in 
business. 

It  must  have  been  close  on  to  midnight  when  he 
waked  me,  sitting  on  the  edge  of  my  bed.  He  must 
have  gone  to  his  own  room  very  softly,  meaning 
not  to  disturb  me;  now  I  heard  him  calling  my 
name  in  a  whisper  and  his  hand  seeking  for  my 
face. 

I  reached  up  and  drew  his  down  to  me. 

"Oh,  my  dear "  I  was  startled  at  what  I 

found  there.  "Beloved,  why  are  you  crying?" 
I  could  feel  him  shake  with  sudden  uncontrollable 
emotion.  I  kept  his  head  on  my  breast  and  com 
forted  him. 

"When  did  you  come  in?" 

"  An  hour  ago  —  you  were  asleep."  The  common 
place  question  seemed  to  quiet  him. 

44 Was  it  something  went  wrong  at  the  dinner?" 

"Wrong,  yes  .  .  .  but  not  there,  not  there. 
It's  all  wrong,  it  has  been  wrong  from  the  beginning. " 

"Dear  heart,  tell  me." 

"Olive,  marry  me;  say  you'll  marry  me!"    There 


A  WOMAN  6F  GENIUS  427 

was  urgency  in  his  whisper,  there  was  pain  in  it. 
"Say  it;  say  it!" 

"I'll  marry  you.  I've  been  waiting  for  you  to 
ask." 

"Oh,  my  dear,  when  I  have  begged  you  so.   .   .   ." 

"TeP  me,"  I  urged.     .     .     . 

"There  isn't  anything  to  tell,  only  .  .  .  we  walked 
along  the  parapet  and  were  very  happy  together. 
They're  a  good  sort.  I've  known  them  for  years. 
And  we  found  a  peasant  woman  selling  lace,  good 
lace,  the  women  said,  and  cheap  .  .  .  Harwood 
bought  some  for  his  wife  .  .  .  and  Stanley  bought 
his  sister  some.  Harwood  went  back,  pretending 
he'd  forgotten  something,  and  bought  a  piece  his 
wife  wanted  and  thought  she  couldn't  afford.  And 
I  couldn't  buy  you  any  .  .  .  not  openly.  I  wanted 
Miss  Stanley  to  select  some  handkerchiefs  that  I 
said  were  for  the  girls  and  she  said  girls  shouldn't 
wear  that  kind.  Oh,  Olive,  don't  you  understand?" 

"I  understand;  you  shall  go  back  to-morrow  and 
buy  me  some." 

"But  it  won't  be  the  same  .  .  .  and  afterward 
.  .  .  after  dinner  we  sat  in  the  garden  and  Harwood 
sat  with  his  arm  round  his  wife's  chair.  And  you 
were  over  here  .  .  .  hiding!  Oh,  Olive,  I  want  my 
wife,  I  want  her  ...  in  the  light,  before  everybody. 
I  want  her."  I  was  crying  now. 

"It's  all  wrong,"  he  insisted,  "it's  been  wrong 
from  the  beginning.  We  belong  together,  before 


428  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

everybody."  He  kept  repeating  that  phrase  over 
and  over.  "All  the  years  that  we've  been  apart  .  .  . 
and  now  just  to  have  it  in  a  hole  in  a  corner!" 

"No,  no,  my  dear!"  I  protested.  "Before  God 
.  .  .  it's  been  before  God!"  We  sobbed  together. 
By  and  by  Love  came  and  comforted  us. 

I  suppose  if  it  had  been  possible  to  go  out  and  be 
married  immediately  we  should  have  married  the 
next  morning;  but  in  Italy  there  are  observances  — 
it  would  have  taken  three  weeks  at  least  and  hardly 
less  in  Switzerland.  In  two  weeks  our  vacation 
came  to  an  end.  Helmeth  set  out  by  the  shortest 
route  for  Mexico  and  I  interposed  a  week's  shopping 
between  me  and  Mrs.  Franklin  Shane  to  whom  I 
had  pledged  myself  for  a  week  at  her  country  house. 
In  November  I  was  to  meet  Helmeth  Garrett  in 
New  York,  "and  settle  things"  he  had  stipulated. 
Somehow  I  could  not  bring  myself  to  think  of  my 
relation  to  him  as  involving  cataclysmal  changes.  I 
wouldn't  say  to  myself  that  I  intended  to  marry 
him,  and  I  couldn't  say  that  I  wouldn't. 


CHAPTER  V 

WITHIN  a  week  after  my  return,  Polatkin  came  to 
see  me  about  a  project  of  a  theatre  of  my  own, 
which  had  been  on  the  horizon  since  the  year  before. 
Polatkin  himself  was  to  furnish  the  money,  which, 
considering  what  he  had  made  out  of  me  under  our 
earlier  contract,  he  was  not  in  the  least  loath  to  do. 
He  couldn't  understand  why  I  hesitated. 

"Is  it  that  you  think  you  are  getting  along  with 
out  Polatkin?  Well,  you  can  try."  I  hastened  to  re 
assure  him.  "Well  then  —  are  you  getting  cold  feet 
about  that  Ravenscroft  woman?  Understand  me,  she 
can't  act  at  all.  It's  something  scandalous  the  way 
she  tries  to  act  like  you  do,  and  she  can't.  If  I  was 
her  manager  I  would  introduce  a  tight  rope  into  the 
third  act  and  have  her  walk  it,  but  what  I  would  have 
something  that  wasn't  copied  from  somebody  else." 

"I  wasn't  thinking  of  Miss  Ravenscroft,"  I  con 
fessed.  "I'm  thinking  of  getting  married." 

"Married!  Married!  And  leave  the  stage?  My 

God  —  it  is  a  sin !"  He  clutched  the  air  and 

shook  handfuls  of  it  in  my  face.  "What  do  you 
want  to  get  married  for?"  he  demanded.  "Ain't 
you  getting  on  like  anything?  Ain't  you  popular? 
Ain't  you  making  money?" 


430  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"All  of  those,"  I  admitted. 

"Well,  then?"  His  wrath  which  had  frothed 
white  for  a  moment,  cooled  down  into  a  fluid  sort 
of  bewilderment  which  seemed  about  to  set  and 
harden  in  a  smile  of  disbelief. 

"The  man  I  am  going  to  marry  lives  in  Mexico." 

"Mexico!  Mexico!"  he  bubbled  again.  "I  ask 
you  is  that  any  sort  of  a  place  for  a  man  to  live 
what  marries  the  greatest  tragic  actress  ever  was 
going  to  be? 

"Ach,  my  Gott,"  in  moments  of  great  excitement 
he  reverted  to  the  trick  of  the  tongue  to  which  he 
was  born.  "All  these  years  I  have  waited  for  this, 
I  have  said  Miss  Lattimore  is  a  great  actress,  she  has 
talent,  she  has  brains,  and  when  she  will  have 
passion  —  Pouff!"  He  blew  out  his  loose  lips  and 
made  a  balloon  with  his  hands  to  express  the  rate 
at  which  I  would  rise  in  the  scale  of  tragic  actresses. 
"And  now  that  it  has  happened,  she  wants  to  live 
in  Mexico."  He  deflated  himself  suddenly,  folded 
his  hands  over  what  he  believed  to  be  his  bosom, 
and  looked  at  me  reproachfully.  This  being  the 
first  time  he  had  studied  my  face  directly  since  I  came 
home,  I  suppose  he  must  have  seen  there  my  doubt 
and  indecision. 

"Understand  me,"  he  said  soberly,  "I  have 
known  a  lot  of  actresses,  and  I  want  to  tell  you  that 
this  marrying  business  don't  pay.  They  got  to 
come  back  to  the  stage;  they  got  to.  You  ain't 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  431 

going  to  be  any  different  down  there  in  Mexico  to 
what  you  are  in  New  York,  understand  me.  Yah! 
Mexico!"  The  word  seemed  to  inflame  him.  But 
he  had  the  sense  to  let  me  alone  for  a  while. 

A  few  days  later  I  saw  in  the  paper  that  he  had 
taken  the  lease  of  the  theatre  he  had  mentioned  to 
me,  and  I  knew  that  he  wasn't  counting  on  my 
going  to  Mexico. 

I  suppose  if  I  had  had  the  courage  to  look  into 
my  own  mind  to  find  out  what  I  wished  to  do,  I 
might  have  surmised  what  was  going  on  there  from 
the  fact  that  I  didn't  mention  the  idea  of  marriage  to 
Sarah.  I  have  tried — all  this  book  has  had  no  other 
purpose  in  fact,  than  to  try  to  tell  how  I  came  to 
be  in  the  relation  I  was  to  Helmeth  Garrett,  came 
into  it  as  to  a  room  long  prepared  for  me,  without  any 
struggles  or  tormenting,  and  without  thinking  much 
about  the  effect  that  his  presence  in  my  life  would 
have  upon  my  work.  I  suppose  that  in  as  much  as 
I  had  a  man's  attitude  toward  work,  I  had  come 
unconsciously  to  the  man's  habit  of  keeping  love 
and  my  career,  in  two  watertight  compartments. 
I  found  I  was  not  able  to  think  of  them  as  having 
much  to  do  with  one  another.  Still  less  had  I  the 
traditional  shames  of  my  situation. 

I  remember  the  first  time  I  went  to  rehearsal, 
groping  about  in  my  consciousness  for  the  source  of 
what  I  felt  suddenly  divide  me  from  the  rest  of  my 
company,  and  finding  it  in  the  knowledge  of  myself 


432  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

as  a  woman  acquainted  with  passion,  with  a  secret, 
delicious  life.  And  far  from  identifying  me  with 
the  cheapness  and  betrayal  which  until  now  I  had 
supposed  inseparable  from  the  uncertified  union,  it 
set  me  apart  in  the  aloofness  of  the  exclusive,  the 
distinguishing  experience.  It  remained  for  Sarah 
to  pierce  me,  in  spite  of  all  I  intrinsically  felt  my 
relation  to  Helmeth  Garrett  to  be,  with  the  knowl 
edge  of  where  I  stood  in  the  world  which  I  still  be 
lieved  had  the  last  word  about  human  conduct. 

It  was  not  altogether  the  intent  to  deceive,  that 
kept  me  from  opening  the  matter  to  her  in  the 
beginning,  but  a  feeling  that  the  less  advice  I  had 
about  it  the  better.  And  if  I  did  tell  her,  I  wished 
first  to  arrange  that  I  need  not  feel  any  constraint 
upon  me  of  our  habit  of  living  together.  I  was 
anxious  to  have  Helmeth  find  me  when  he  came,  free 
to  be  all  to  him  that  our  love  demanded,  and  in  view 
of  all  the  years  in  which  Sarah  and  I  had  lived  to 
gether,  I  did  not  know  how  to  go  about  it.  I  began 
to  think  that  I  should  have  to  tell  her  after  all,  when 
the  Powers,  who  must  have  known  very  well  what 
was  going  on,  took  that  into  account  also. 

Sarah's  season  began  a  week  before  mine,  and  I 
remember  her  saying  that  she  would  be  glad  when 
we  could  come  home  together,  as  she  had  had  an 
uneasy  sensation  for  the  last  night  or  two,  of  some 
one  following  her.  Sarah  had  any  number  of  admir 
ers,  but  the  sort  of  men  who  were  attracted  to  her 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  433 

still  splendour,  were  not  the  kind  to  follow  her  home 
at  night. 

"Turn  them  over  to  the  police,"  I  suggested.  I 
had  had  to  try  that  once  or  twice. 

"Oh,  I  couldn't!"  She  turned  scarlet.  Even 
after  all  those  years  I  had  not  realized  how  all  her 
life  was  timed  to  catch  the  slightest  approaching 
footfall  of  what,  to  her  simple  faith,  must  inevitably 
come.  I  found  her  waiting  for  me  at  the  stage  door 
on  my  first  night  —  no  matter  how  many  of  them 
you  have,  first  nights  are  always  in  the  balance  — 
and  we  were  so  taken  up  with  discussing  how  I  had 
got  on  with  it,  that  it  wasn't  until  I  was  fitting 
the  key  in  the  lock  that  I  was  recalled  to  the  occasion 
of  her  annoyance.  Just  below  us  there  seemed  to 
be  a  man  dodging  in  and  out  of  the  blocks  of  shadow 
made  by  the  high-railed  stairways  that  led  up  to  the 
first  floor  of  the  row  of  flats  in  which  our  rooms  were 
located.  Something  in  the  figure,  or  in  our  standing 
there  before  the  shadowed  door  with  the  dull  light  of 
the  transom  over  us,  brushed  me  with  a  light  wing  of 
memory;  I  seemed  to  recall  some  such  conjunction 
before,  but  it  was  gone  before  I  could  connote  the 
suggestion  with  time  or  place.  All  I  said  to  Sarah 
was  that  if  we  saw  anything  more  of  that  we  would 
certainly  speak  to  the  police. 

The  next  night  we  went  to  supper  with  friends, 
and  it  was  after  midnight  when  my  cab — Sarah  didn't 
afford  cabs  for  herself  —  drew  up  at  the  door.  The 


434  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  % 

approach  to  it  was  by  way  of  a  handsome  pair  of 
stairs  with  an  ornamental  iron  railing  of  so  close  a 
pattern  that  any  one  sitting  on  the  steps  in  the  dark, 
would  be  pretty  well  concealed  by  it.  That  there 
was  some  one  so  sitting,  dropped  there  in  a  stupour 
of  fatigue  or  drunkenness,  we  did  not  discover  until 
we  stumbled  fairly  on  to  him. 

The  exclamation  we  raised,  awoke  him;  it  arrested 
the  attention  of  the  cab  driver  just  turning  from  the 
curb,  he  raised  his  lamp  and  sent  the  rays  of  it 
streaming  over  us.  The  man  I  could  see,  was 
shabby,  ill  and  embarrassed,  he  ducked  his  head 
from  the  light,  but  his  hat  had  fallen  off  on  the  step 
and  as  he  threw  up  his  arm  to  protect  himself  from 
recognition  I  knew  him  by  the  gesture. 

"Griff,"  I  cried.  "Griffin!  You!"  I  caught 
him  by  the  arm.  He  let  it  fall  at  his  side  and  stood 
looking  at  us  pitifully,  like  a  trapped  animal. 

"I  wasn't  doing  any  harm,"  he  mumbled.  The 
cab  driver  seeing  that  we  knew  him,  let  down  his 
lights  and  clattered  away.  I  thought  quickly;  he 
must  have  been  in  want,  he  had  looked  for  me  and 
at  the  last  was  ashamed  to  claim  me. 

"But,  Griffin,"  I  insisted,  "you  don't  know  how 
glad  I  am  to  see  you  —  you  must  come  in."  He 
wasn't  looking  at  me;  he  hadn't  heard  me. 

"Look  out,"  he  said,  "she's  going  to  faint!"  He 
brushed  past  me  to  Sarah.  She  leaned  limp  against 
the  railing;  he  steadied  her  as  a  man  might  a  sacred 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  435 

vessel  in  jeopardy.  But  Sarah  didn't  faint  so  easily 
as  that,  she  gathered  herself  away  from  his  hand. 

"Come  upstairs,"  she  commanded.  It  was  only 
one  flight  up.  I  don't  know  how  we  managed  to 
get  a  light  and  to  find  ourselves  in  its  pale  flare, 
confronting  one  another.  I  could  see  then  that  my 
first  surmise  had  been  correct  about  Griffin,  to  the 
extent  that  he  looked  ill  and  in  want.  He  was 
holding  his  hat,  which  he  had  picked  up  from  the 
stairs,  and  fumbled  it  steadily  in  his  hands.  His 
hair,  which  wanted  trimming  more  even  than  when 
I  had  last  seen  him,  had  still  its  romantic  curl;  he 
looked  steadily  out  from  under  it  at  Sarah.  I  had 
an  idea,  though  I  think  it  must  have  been  derived 
from  my  own  dizziness  at  what  rushed  in  upon  me, 
that  Sarah  was  floating  in  air,  that  she  hung  there 
swaying  with  the  breeze  from  the  open  window,  as  a 
spirit.  She  was  spirit  white  and  her  voice  seemed 
to  come  from  far. 

"Leon!  Leon!"  How  he  knew  what  she  de 
manded  of  him  only  the  God  who  makes  men  and 
women  to  love  one  another,  knows. 

"She  died,"  he  said  to  the  unspoken  question. 
"She  died  two  years  ago.  I've  been  all  this  time 
finding  you."  Suddenly  a  quick  flame  burst  over 
Sarah. 

"You  came  —  you  came  to  me!"  I  could  see 
that  she  moved  toward  him,  all  her  magnificent 
body  alight,  her  arms,  her  bosom.  I  turned  quickly 


436  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

through  the  door  into  the  room  beyond.  I  couldn't 
stay  to  see  that.  I  went  on  into  my  bedroom  and 
knelt  down,  hiding  my  face  in  the  bedclothes.  I 
think  I  meant  to  pray,  but  no  words  came.  I  rose 
presently  and  went  into  the  kitchen.  The  maid 
did  not  sleep  in  the  flat  but  came  every  morning 
at  nine;  on  the  table  there  was  a  tray  as  she  left 
it  always,  with  everything  laid  out  in  case  we  should 
be  hungry  coming  late  from  the  theatre.  I  moved 
about  softly  and  made  chocolate  and  sandwiches 
and  arranged  them  on  the  tray;  I  knew  Sarah  would 
understand.  About  half  an  hour  after  I  had  gone 
to  my  room  again,  I  heard  her  go  out  to  find  it. 

From  time  to  time  I  could  catch  a  faint  murmur 
from  the  front  room.  I  put  the  pillow  over  my  head 
and  cried  softly.  I  remembered  how  Griffin  had 
looked  at  her  that  time  in  Chicago  when  I  had 
taken  him  to  fsThe  Futurist/9  and  how  I  had  been 
ashamed  ever  to  introduce  him.  I  wondered 
whether  his  real  name  were  Lawrence  or  Griffin.  I 
had  fallen  asleep  at  last,  and  I  was  awakened  by 
Sarah  standing  beside  me  in  her  white  gown. 

"May  I  sleep  with  you,  Olivia?  I've  put  .  .  . 
Mr.  Lawrence  ...  in  my  room."  I  drew  her  under 
the  cover  with  me;  she  was  cold  and  now  and  then 
a  shudder  passed  through  her  from  head  to  foot. 

"You  guessed,  didn't  you?"  she  whispered. 
"He  said  you  knew  him  in  Chicago.  His  .  .  .  Mrs. 
Lawrence  is  dead  .  .  .  you  heard  him  say  that  ?" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  437 

I  understood  she  meant  by  that  to  extenuate  his 
coming  back  to  her.  It  was  right  for  him  to  come 
if  no  other  woman  stood  in  the  way;  what  there 
was  in  himself  that  stood  in  the  way  didn't  seem  to 
matter. 

"He's  been  ill,"  she  said.  "I  hope  you  didn't 
mind  my  keeping  him  in  the  house,  Olive  .... 
We  can  be  married  to-morrow." 

I  sat  straight  up  in  bed  in  my  amazement. 

"Sarah!  You  don't  mean  that  you  are  going 
to  marry  him!" 

"Why,  what  else  is  there  to  do?" 

"But,  Sarah  .  .  ."  I  lay  down  again.  After 
all  what  else  was  there  to  do? 

"You  know,  Olivia,  you  have  never  really  loved 
anybody."  I  had  no  answer  to  that;  suddenly 
she  broke  out  shaking  the  bed  with  h'er  sobs.  "Oh, 
my  dear,  my  dear,  it  is  true  that  he  loved  me.  It  is 
true.  He  came  back  to  me  as  soon  as  he  was  free. 
Oh,  Olive,  if  you  had  known  what  it  is  all  these 
years  not  to  know  if  it  was  true!  If  he  hadn't  only 
taken  me  just  as  a  stop-gap  ...  a  fancy  .  .  . 
how  was  I  to  know?" 

I  didn't  think  very  much  of  the  proof  that  he 
loved  her  now.  Sarah,  beautiful,  prosperous,  was  a 
goal  for  any  man  to  strive  toward,  even  without  the 
necessity  which  was  written  in  every  line  of  Leon 
Griffin  Lawrence. 

"Sarah,"  I  questioned  gently,  "do  you  mean  to 


438  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

say  you've  loved  him  all  this  time,  that  you  love 
him  now?"  She  left  off  sobbing  to  answer  me  with 
that  steady,  patient  truth  with  which  she  met  any 
issue  of  life. 

"I  loved  him  ...  all  the  love  I  had  I  gave 
him.  It's  not  the  same  now,  of  course;  its  wings 
are  broken,  but  it  is  his.  Once  you've  given  you 
can't  take  it  back  again." 

"But  he  —  he  has  no  claim  on  you  now.  Sarah, 
do  you  need  to  marry  him?" 

"I  am  married  to  him." 

"But,  Sarah  .  .  .  look  here,  Sarah,  it  isn't  true 
that  I  have  never  loved.  I  didn't  love  the  man  I 
was  married  to,  but  I  have  learned  something  about 
love;  I've  learned  that  marriage  without  it  is  a  thing 
no  self-respecting  woman  should  go  into." 

"Love,"  said  Sarah,  "  is  a  thing  that  once  you've 
gone  into,  binds  you  by  something  that  grows  out 
of  it  that  is  stronger  than  love  itself.  Olivia,  I  am 
bound  ...  if  you  want  to  know,  I'd  rather  be 
bound  to  —  to  Leon  Lawrence  by  that  tie  than  to 
the  dearest  love  without  it.  Oh,  Olivia,  can't  you 
see,  can't  you  understand  that  I  have  to  do  right 
.  .  .  that  the  way  I  see  things  there's  a  law  .  .  . 
not  a  civil  law  but  a  law  of  loving  that  goes  on  by 
itself;  and  being  faithful  to  it  is  better  to  me  than 
loving.  You  must  see  that,  Olivia." 

"I  see  that  this  is  the  -happiest  thing  for  you  and 
I'll  not  put  anything  in  your  way,  Sarah."  I 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  439 

kissed  her.  What,  after  all,  does  one  soul  know  of 
another. 

It  came  to  me  as  an  extenuating  circumstance 
when  I  looked  him  over  the  next  morning,  that  Mr. 
Lawrence  wouldn't  live  long  enough  to  do  her  any 
particular  harm.  He  had  been  so  little  of  a  man 
always  to  me,  so  much  less  so  now,  eaten  through 
as  he  was  by  poverty  and  sickness,  that  I  could 
never  understand  how  he  happened  to  be  the 
vehicle  of  that  appealing  charm  which  even  as  I 
looked,  drew  me  over  to  his  side  in  something  like  a 
sympathetic  frame. 

I  could  see  that  he  regarded  me  anxiously,  and 
I  thought  it  to  his  credit  to  be  able  to  realize  that 
there  might  be  somebody  not  absolutely  delighted 
at  his  marrying  Sarah.  But  it  wasn't,  as  I  learned 
later,  any  sense  of  his  shortcomings  that  waked  in 
his  eye  toward  me. 

He  was  lying  on  the  sofa  in  our  little  parlour, 
for  the  shock  of  the  encounter  had  been  too  much 
for  the  abused  and  broken  thing  he  was.  Sarah  had 
gone  out,  to  consult  Jerry,  I  believed  about  their 
marriage ;  —  she  wouldn't  have  asked  me  knowing 
how  I  felt  about  it.  Griffin  looked  up  at  me  with 
the  old  formless  demand  on  my  consideration. 

"You've  never  told  her,  have  you?" 

"Told  what?  "  On  my  part  it  was  genuine  amaze 
ment. 

"About  us,  you  know  .  .  .  there  in  Chicago." 


440  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

He  dropped  his  eyes;  something  almost  like  a  blush 
of  shame  overcame  him.  I  stared. 

"Good  heavens,  Griff,  I'd  forgotten  it." 

"Oh,  well,  I  didn't  know — some  women " 

He  stopped,  embarrassed  by  my  sheer  credulity  of 
its  having  anything  to  do  with  his  relation  to  Sarah. 
"I  told  you  I  was  a  bad  lot,"  he  protested,  "but 
I  swear  that  since  my  wife  died  and  I  could  come 
back  to  her,  I've  been  straight.  You  believe  that, 
don't  you?" 

"Oh,  I'll  believe  it  if  it's  any  comfort  to  you." 
When  I  talked  it  over  with  Jerry  afterward  I  could 
see  the  queer,  twisted  kind  of  moral  standard  by 
which  he  made  it  appear  that  any  irregularity  of 
his  during  his  wife's  life,  was  unfaithfulness  to  her, 
and  not  to  Sarah. 

She  had  come  back  with  Jerry  and  I  was  walking 
with  him  to  the  City  Hall  for  the  license;  he  had 
begun  by  protesting  just  as  I  had,  and  had  sur 
rendered  to  his  conviction  that  nothing  less  would 
satisfy  Sarah. 

"After  all,'*  I  said,  "it  shows  that  there  is  some 
sort  of  harmony  between  them,  that  he  should 
realize  that  the  only  reparation  he  could  make 
would  be  to  come  back  to  her." 

"Cur!"  Jerry  kicked  at  the  pavement,  "to  pol 
lute  the  life  of  a  woman  like  Sarah  with  his  wretched 
existence." 

"That's  how  you  feel,"  I  reminded  him,  "but 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  441 

remember  how  all  these  years  Sarah  has  felt  pol 
luted  by  the  thought  that  she  wasn't  married  to 
him." 

"Oh,  damn!" 

"Sarah  thinks,  and  I'm  beginning  to  think  so 
too,  that  there  is  something  to  marriage  that  binds 
besides  the  ceremony." 

"I  know."  Jerry's  wife  had  left  him  that  summer 
and  though  he  knew  it  was  the  best  thing  for  both 
of  them,  he  was  trying  to  get  her  back  again:  "It 
binds  of  itself.  If  only  they  would  tell  us  that  in 
the  beginning  instead  of  putting  up  all  this  stuff 
about  its  being  the  law  and  religion.  We  think 
we  can  get  out  of  it  just  by  getting  out  of  the  law, 
and  none  of  us  know  better  until  it  is  too  late." 

"People  like  Sarah  know.  They  know  just  the 
way  swallows  know  to  go  south  in  winter.  You'll 
see;  she  will  be  happier  married,  not  because  it  is 
pleasant  but  because  it  is  right." 

They  were  married  that  afternoon  in  our  apart 
ment,  and  it  was  not  until  I  was  settled  in  the  hotel 
where  I  had  elected  to  stay  until  I  could  find  suitable 
quarters,  that  I  realized  that  the  chance  of  this 
marriage  had  accomplished  for  me  the  freedom  that 
I  had  not  known  how  to  obtain  for  myself. 

I  lay  awake  a  long  time  after  I  came  from  the 
theatre,  and  the  mere  circumstance  of  my  being 
alone  and  in  a  hotel,  as  well  as  the  events  that  led 
up  to  it,  brought  back  to  me  the  sense  of  my  lover, 


442  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

of  his  being  just  in  the  next  room  and  presently  to 
come  in  to  me.  I  felt  near  and  warm  toward  him. 
And  then  I  thought  of  Sarah  and  Griffin  and  how 
almost  I  had  become  the  stop-gap  to  his  affections 
that  she  dreaded  most  to  find  herself  to  have  been. 
It  didn't  seem  very  real  in  retrospect.  I  shuddered 
away  from  it.  Then  I  began  to  think  how  I  had 
first  been  kindly  disposed  toward  him,  and  that 
brought  up  an  image  of  the  dim  corridor  of  the  hotel 
where  I  had  come  to  my  first  knowledge  of  such 
relations,  and  my  abhorrence  and  terror  of  it.  I 
thought  of  OTarrell  and  of  Miss  Dean,  and  that 
suspicion  of  sickliness  which  her  personality  had  for 
me,  and  saw  how  it  must  have  arisen  from  her 
consciousness  of  what  she  had  done  to  Griffin  rather 
than  her  relation  to  Manager  OTarrell.  Then  I 
thought  of  Helmeth  Garrett  and  one  night  in  Sienna 
when  the  moonlight  poured  white  over  the  cathe 
dral  .  .  .  and  a  linden  tree  in  bloom  outside  the 
window  .  .  .  and  a  nightingale  singing  in  it  ... 
Suddenly  it  was  mixed  up  in  my  mind  with  the 
slanting  chandelier  and  the  tin-faced  clock,  and 
slowly  a  sense  of  unutterable  stain  and  shame  began 
to  percolate  through  and  through  me. 


CHAPTER  VI 

IT  is  a  great  mistake  to  suppose  that  assertiveness 
is  the  only  mannish  trait  taken  on  by  successful 
women,  nor  is  pliability  the  only  feminine  mark 
they  lose.  By  what  insensible  degrees  it  came 
about  I  do  not  know,  but  I  found  myself  on  the  peak 
of  popularity,  very  much  of  the  male  propensity  to  be 
beguiled.  I  was  willing  to  be  played  upon,  and  so  it 
was  skilfully  done,  to  concede  to  it  more  than  the 
situation  had  a  right  to  claim  for  itself.  I  pulled 
myself  up  afterward,  or  was  pulled  up  by  the  sharp 
rein  of  destiny,  but  for  the  time,  while  my  success 
was  new,  I  was  aware  not  only  of  the  possibility  of  my 
being  handled,  but  of  my  luxuriating  in  it,  of  de 
manding  it  as  the  price  of  my  favour,  and  in  particular, 
of  valuing  Polatkin  for  the  way  in  which,  by  my  own 
moods,  my  drops  and  exaltations  he  brought  me  to 
his  hand. 

How  much  of  the  fact  of  my  private  life  he  was 
really  acquainted  with,  I  never  knew,  but  he  under 
stood  enough  of  its  reaction  to  make  even  my 
resistences  serve  to  push  me  on  to  the  assured 
position  of  a  theatre  and  a  clientele  of  my  own.  It 
stood  out  for  me  as  he  described  it,  not  so  much  as  a 
means  of  dividing  me  from  my  beloved,  but  as  a  new 

443 


444  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

and  completer  way  of  loving.  I  wanted  more  ways 
for  that,  space  and  opportunity.  I  wished  to  lay  my 
gift  down,  a  royal  carpet  for  Helmeth  Garrett  to 
walk  on;  I  would  have  done  anything  for  him  with  it 
except  surrender  it.  Not  the  least  thing  that  came 
of  my  condition  was  the  extraordinary  florescence  of 
my  art. 

Every  night  as  I  drew  its  rich  and  shining  fabric 
about  me  I  was  aware  of  all  forms  and  passions, 
the  mere  masquerade  of  our  delight  in  one  another. 
Every  night  I  embroidered  it  anew,  I  adored  and 
caressed  him  with  my  skill.  Polatkin  went  about 
wringing  his  hands  over  it. 

"You  are  a  Wonder,  a  Wonder!  And  you  are 
wasting  it  on  them  swine. "  That  was  his  opinion 
of  my  support.  "And  to  think  you  could  have  a 
theatre  of  your  own,  and  what  you  like " 

"  A  theatre  like  me  —  Me  spread  over  it,  expressed, 
exemplified,  carried  out  to  the  least  detail?" 

"You  shall  have  it  even  in  the  box  office!"  he 
responded  magnificently. 

"How  soon?" 

"I  will  bring  the  plans  this  afternoon;  I  got  'em 
ready  in  case  you  came  around. "  But  he  was  much 
too  intelligent  to  undertake  to  bind  me  to  them 
at  that  juncture. 

Things  went  on  like  this  until  the  last  week  in 
November,  then  I  had  a  telegram  from  Helmeth 
saying  that  he  would  be  detained  still  longer. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  445 

Every  pulse  of  me  had  so  been  set  to  his  coming  on 
the  twenty-seventh  that  I  thought  I  should  not  be 
able  to  go  on  after  that,  I  should  go  out  like  a  light 
when  the  current  is  stopped.  I  had  so  little  of  him, 
not  even  a  photograph,  nothing  but  my  ring  and  a 
few  trinkets  he  had  bought  me  in  Italy.  If  I  could 
have  had  a  garment  he  had  worn,  a  chair  in  which 
he  had  sat  ...  I  went  round  and  looked  at  the 
Astor  House,  because  he  told  me  that  he  had  stopped 
there  once,  years  ago. 

I  stood  that  for  three  days  and  then  I  went  down 
to  New  Rochelle  where  he  had  written  me  earlier, 
his  girls  were  at  school;  not  on  my  own  account,  you 
understand,  but  as  a  possible  patron  of  the  school  on 
behalf  of  my  niece,  who  was,  if  the  truth  must  be 
told,  less  than  two  years  old.  While  I  was  being 
shown  about,  I  had  Helmeth's  children  pointed  out 
to  me.  They  looked,  as  I  had  surmised,  like  their 
mother.  If  they  had  in  the  least  resembled  their 
father  I  should  have  snatched  them  to  me.  Every 
thing  might  have  turned  out  quite  differently. 
They  were,  the  principal  said,  nice  girls  and  studious, 
but  they  did  not  look  in  the  least  like  their  father. 

It  was  one  of  those  dark,  gusty  days  that  come  at 
the  end  of  November,  damp  without  rain,  and  of  a 
penetrating  cold.  There  had  been  a  great  storm  at 
sea  lately  and  you  could  hear  the  wash  of  its  dis 
turbances  all  along  the  Sound.  There  was  no  steady 
wind,  but  now  and  then  the  damp  air  gave  a  flap  like 


446  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

p 

an  idle  wing.     It  was  like  the  stir  in  me  of  a  formless, 

cold  desire,  not  equal  to  the  demand  Life  was  about  to 
make  on  it.  As  I  turned  into  the  station  road  after 
a  formal  inspection  of  the  premises,  I  met  the  girls 
coming  back  from  their  afternoon  walk  with  the 
teachers,  two  and  two.  The  Garrett  girls  were  next 
to  the  last,  they  were  very  near  of  an  age;  I  waited 
half  hidden  by  a  tree  to  watch  them  as  they  passed. 

They  were  well  covered  up  from  the  weather  in 
large  blue  coats  with  capes,  and  blue  felt  hats  with 
butterfly  bows  to  match  at  the  ends  of  their  flaxen 
braids.  They  looked  like  their  mother  ...  I 
couldn't  see  them  growing  up  to  anything  that  would 
fit  with  Sarah  and  Jerry  and  Polatkin.  The  wing  of 
the  wind  shook  out  some  gathered  drops  of  moisture 
as  they  passed,  the  branches  of  the  trees  clashed 
softly  together,  and  as  they  turned  into  the  grounds 
I  noticed  that  the  older  one  had  something  in  her 
walk  that  reminded  me  of  her  father. 

I  was  pierced  through  with  a  formless  jealousy  of 
the  woman  who  had  borne  them  in  her  body.  I  was 
moved,  but  not  with  the  impulse  to  draw  them  to  my 
bosom.  I  felt  back  in  the  place  where  my  boy  had 
been,  for  the  connecting  link  of  motherliness  and 
failed  to  find  it.  I  had  had  it  once,  that  knowledge  of 
what  is  good  to  be  done  for  small  children  and  the 
wish  to  do  it,  but  it  was  gone  from  me.  It  was  as 
though  I  might  have  had  a  hand  or  a  claw,  any  pre 
hensile  organ  by  which  such  things  are  apprehended, 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  447 

and  when  I  reached  it  out  after  Helmeth's  children 
it  was  withered. 

What  I  found  in  myself  was  the  familiar  attitude 
of  the  stage.  I  could  have  acted  what  swept  through 
me  then,  I  could  have  brought  you  to  tears  by  it,  but 
there  was  nothing  I  could  do  about  it  but  act.  I 
wrote  Helmeth  that  night  that  I  had  seen  the  chil 
dren  and  then  I  burned  the  letter. 

He  came  at  last.  He  was  greatly  concerned  about 
his  enterprise  which  was  not  yet  established  on 
that  footing  which  he  would  like  to  have  for  it,  and  I 
think  it  was  a  relief  to  him  to  have  me  without  the 
conventions  and  readjustments  of  marriage.  It  was 
tacitly  understood  between  us  that  things  were 
better  as  they  were  until  that  business  was  settled. 
I  think  he  could  not  have  had  a  great  deal  of  money 
at  the  time;  all  that  racing  to  and  fro  between  London 
and  Mexico  must  have  cost  something.  His  anxiety 
about  the  girls,  which  occasioned  his  sending  them  to 
the  most  expensive  schools,  and  his  affection  for 
them,  which  led  to  their  being  carted  about  by  their 
aunt  to  meet  him  occasionally  at  far-called  places, 
was  an  additional  drain. 

We  were  very  happy;  there  is  nothing  whatever 
to  tell  about  it.  We  met  in  brief  intervals  snatched 
from  our  work  and  did  as  other  lovers  do.  Some 
times  he  would  come  for  me  at  the  theatre — the  fresh 
ness  of  my  acting  never  palled  on  him.  Other  times 
I  would  find  him  waiting  for  me  in  the  little  flat  I  had 


448  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

expressly  chosen  and  furnished  to  be  loved  in.  The 
pricking  warmth  of  his  presence  would  meet  me  as  I 
came  up  the  stair.  Not  long  ago  I  found  myself 
unexpectedly  in  a  part  of  the  city  where  we  used  to 
walk  because  we  were  certain  not  to  meet  any  of  our 
friends  there.  There  was  a  tiny  cafe  where  we  used 
often  to  dine,  and  the  memory  of  it  swept  over  me 
terrifyingly  fresh  and  strong. 

With  all  this,  it  was  plain  that  we  got  on  best  when 
we  were  most  alone.  It  was  not  that  I  did  not 
every  way  like  and  was  interested  in  the  friends  he 
introduced  to  me,  outdoor  men  most  of  them,  and 
their  large-minded,  capable  wives.  I  got  on  with 
them  tremendously,  and  found  them  as  good  for  me 
as  green  food  in  the  spring,  sated  as  I  was  on  the 
combined  product  of  professionalism  and  tempera 
ment.  It  was  chiefly  that  the  simplicity  and  open 
ness  of  their  lives  brought  out  for  him  the  duplicity 
that  lay  at  the  bottom  of  ours.  For  it  was  plain  that 
they  wouldn't  have  understood,  wouldn't  have 
thought  it  necessary.  They  could  have  faced,  those 
women,  strange  lands  and  untoward  happenings,  had 
many  of  them  faced  sterner  things  for  the  sake  of 
their  husbands,  with  the  same  courage  and  selfless 
ness  with  which  they  would  in  my  circumstances, 
have  faced  renunciation. 

It  was  the  realization  of  this,  so  much  sharper  in 
him  who  had  seen  and  known,  that  checked  and 
harassed  Helmeth;  he  wished  to  be  at  one  with  them, 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  449 

to  be  felicitated  on  my  success  and  my  charm,  to 
include  me  if  only  by  implication,  in  that  community 
of  adventure  with  which  these  mining  and  engineer 
ing  folk  had  ringed  the  earth.  And  the  necessity  of 
holding  our  relation  down  to  the  outward  forms  of 
friendship  established  on  the  supposition  of  our 
having  grown  up  together,  fretted  him. 

"It  isn't  honest,"  he  broke  out  once  after  he  had 
tried  to  persuade  me  to  let  him  tell  his  friends  that 
we  were  engaged.  "It's  all  right  between  us;  you 
are  my  wife  in  the  sight  of  whatever  gods  there  are, 
but  that  isn't  what  other  people  would  call  you. " 

"Somehow,  Helmeth,  so  long  as  it  is  with  you,  I 
don't  care  much  what  they  call  me. " 

"Well,  I  care;  I  care  a  lot.  You  don't  seem  to 
remember  you  are  going  to  be  my  girls'  mother  — 
sons'  too,  I  hope.  We  ought  to  have  some  more 
children;  Sanderson's  got  four."  Sanderson  had 
been  our  host  at  luncheon  that  day. 

Helmeth  was  knocking  out  the  ashes  of  his  pipe 
on  my  hearthstone;  he  paused  in  the  occupation  of 
refilling  it  to  look  down  at  me  in  a  moody  kind  of 
impatience  that  was  the  worst  I  knew  of  him. 
There  was  the  suggestion  of  a  cleft  in  his  strong, 
square  chin  which  came  out  whenever  he  bit  hard  on 
a  difficult  proposition.  The  play  of  it  now  was  like 
the  tiny  shadow  of  disaster. 

"I  was  down  in  old  Brownlow's  office  the  other 
day,"  he  went  on,  "talking  this  Mexican  scheme  to 


450  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

him,  and  he  had  to  break  off  in  the  middle  of  it  to 
telephone  to  some  chorus  girl  he  had  a  date  with. 
God!  it  made  me  hot  to  think  of  it!" 

"Because  I'm  in  the  same "  He  cut  me  off 

with  a  sound  of  vexation. 

"Don't  say  it;  don't  even  think  of  it!  How  long 
does  this  contract  of  yours  last?" 

"To  the  end  of  the  season,"  I  told  him. 

"Well,  you  chuck  it  just  as  soon  as  you  can.  I'll 
put  this  thing  through  somehow.  We'll  clear  out  of 
here."  He  had  his  pipe  alight  by  now  and  began 
puffing  more  contentedly.  "I  don't  think  much  of 
this  burg  anyway, "  he  laughed  as  he  settled  himself 
in  one  of  my  chairs.  "A  man  doesn't  have  a  chance 
to  get  his  feet  on  the  ground. " 

There  were  times  when  he  almost  made  me  share 
in  his  distaste  for  it.  That  was  when  I  had  drawn 
him  into  the  circle  of  my  professional  acquaintances 
which  somehow  shrivelled  at  his  touch  like  spiders 
in  the  heat.  Understand  that  I  hold  by  my  art,  that 
I  have  poured  myself  a  libation  on  that  altar,  that  I 
value  it  above  all  other  means  of  expressing  the 
drama  of  man's  relation  to  the  Invisible,  and  that  I 
do  not  think  you  do  enough  for  it,  prize  it  enough,  or 
use  it  rightly.  But  I  suppose  there  is  a  yellow  streak 
in  me,  or  I  wouldn't  sicken  so  as  I  do  at  what  it 
brings  to  pass  in  the  personalities  by  which  it  is  most 
forwarded.  For  since  it  must  be  that  art  cannot 
be  served  to  the  world,  except  by  a  cup  emptied  of 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  451 

much  that  is  most  desirable  in  the  recipients,  it  ill 
becomes  them  as  long  as  they  fatten  their  souls  at  it, 
to  take  exception  to  the  vessel  from  which  it  is  drunk. 
Nevertheless  I  used  to  find  myself,  when  Helmeth 
was  with  me,  sniffing  at  the  spiritual  garments  of  my 
friends  for  the  smell  of  burning.  I  resented  Mr. 
Lawrence  the  most;  it  was  not  altogether  for  the 
incongruity  of  his  possessing  Sarah,  her  fine  smudge- 
less  personality  and  her  lovely  body,  delicate  and 
shapely  as  a  pearl,  but  for  the  incontestable  evidence 
he  offered  me  of  how  low  I  had  stooped.  From  the 
peak  of  my  present  prosperity,  my  troubles  in 
Chicago,  showed  the  merest  accident,  and  the  dis 
tance  I  had  sprung  away  from  them  seemed  somehow 
expressive  of  the  strength  with  which  I  had  sprung 
from  all  that  Lawrence  represented.  Not  all  the 
care  Sarah  bestowed  on  him  —  and  I  think  the  best 
he  could  do  for  her  was  to  provide  her  in  his  impaired 
health  with  an  occasion  for  mothering  —  could  quite 
distract  the  attention  from  the  ineradicable  mark  of 
his  cheapness. 

He  was  as  much  out  of  key  with  the  society  in 
which  Sarah's  success  and  mine  had  placed  him, 
as  he  was  flattered  to  find  himself  there.  It  had 
brought  out  in  him  in  the  way  privation  had  not, 
that  touch  of  theatricality  which  intrigued  Sarah's 
unsophisticated  fancy  in  the  first  place.  He  let  his 
hair  grow  into  curls  and  made  a  mysterious  and 
incurable  pain  of  his  broken  health.  And  though  he 


452  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

offered  it  as  the  best  he  had  to  offer,  with  humility, 
he  suffered  an  accession  of  that  devoted  manner 
which  had  won  his  way  among  women  of  his  own 
class,  but  which  among  the  sort  he  met  at  my  rooms 
was  ridiculous.  Jerry  too,  with  his  married  life  in 
dissolution,  for  what  looked  to  Helmeth,  and  in  the 
light  of  his  strong  sense,  was  beginning  to  look  to 
me  like  an  aimless  folly;  out  of  all  these  blew  a  wind 
witheringly  on  the  fine  bloom  of  my  happiness.  We 
did  best  when  we  shut  it  out  in  a  profound,  exalted 
intimacy  of  passion. 

What  leads  me  to  think  that  Polatkin  must  have 
watched  me  rather  closely  all  this  time,  is  the  fact 
that  he  waited  until  Mr.  Garrett  was  gone  to  London 
again  in  the  latter  part  of  February,  to  put  it  to  me 
that  if  I  really  meant  to  leave  the  stage  permanently, 
and  it  was  a  contingency  which,  in  speaking  to  me  of 
it,  he  had  the  wit  to  speak  seriously,  I  could  do  no 
better  for  myself  than  to  take  flight  from  it  from  the 
roof  of  my  own  theatre.  He  put  it  to  me  in  his  own 
dialect,  mixed  of  the  green  room  and  Jewry,  that  I 
had  torn  a  large  hole  in  the  surrounding  professional 
atmosphere  by  the  vitality  of  my  acting  that  winter, 
and  that  it  would  be  a  great  shame  to  go  out  into  the 
obscurity  of  marriage  without  this  final  pyrotechnic 
burst. 

I  could  have,  by  his  calculation,  a  short  season  to 
open  with,  and  a  whole  year  of  brilliant  success 
before  —  well  before  anything  happened.  I  think 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  453 

by  this  time  I  must  have  known  subconsciously  that 
nothing  would  happen.  It  must  be  because  no  man 
naturally  can  imagine  any  more  compelling  business 
for  a  woman  than  being  interested  in  him,  that 
Helmeth  failed  to  understand  that  he  could  as  well 
have  torn  himself  from  the  enterprise  for  which  he 
had  starved  and  sweated,  as  separate  me  from  the 
final  banquet  of  success.  I  had  paid  for  it  and  I 
must  eat. 

We  opened  in  May,  not  the  best  time  of  year  for 
such  an  adventure;  but  I  suppose  Polatkin  was  afraid 
to  trust  me  to  the  distractions  of  another  vacation. 
It  occurs  to  me  now,  though  at  the  time  I  didn't 
suspect  him,  that  we  couldn't  have  opened  even 
then  if  he  had  not  been  much  more  forward  with  the 
plan  than  at  any  time  he  had  permitted  me  to  guess. 
At  the  last  I  came  near,  in  his  estimation,  to  jeopard 
izing  the  whole  business  by  opening  with  "The  Win 
ter's  Tale"  with  Sarah  in  the  part  of  Hermione  and 
myself  as  Perdita.  Jerry  was  writing  me  a  new  play, 
but  in  the  process  of  breaking  off  a  marriage  that 
ought  never  to  have  been  begun,  he  had  found  no 
time  to  complete  it;  but  why,  urged  Polatkin,  if  we 
must  fall  back  on  Shakespeare,  choose  a  part  that 
did  not  introduce  me  to  the  audience  until  the  play 
was  half  done?  He  stood  out  at  least  for  Juliet  or 
Cleopatra.  "Why,  indeed,"  I  retorted,  "have  a 
theatre  of  my  own  if  it  is  not  to  do  as  I  please  in  it?  " 
I  knew  however  that  what  I  could  put  into  Perdita, 


454  .  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

of  Willesden  Lake  and  the  woods  aflame,  would  have 
sustained  even  a  more  inconsiderable  part. 

Effie  and  her  husband  came  on  to  my  opening 
night.  I  want  to  say  here,  if  I  have  not  explicitly 
said  it,  that  my  sister  is  a  wonderful,  an  indispensable 
woman.  When  I  think  of  her,  the  mystery  of  how 
she  came  out  of  Taylorville,  full-fledged  to  her  time, 
is  greater  than  the  mystery  of  how  I  came  to  be  at  all. 
For  Effie  is  absolutely  contemporaneous.  She  lives 
squarely  not  only  in  her  century,  but  in  the  particular 
quarter  of  it  now  going.  No  clutch  of  tradition 
topples  her  toward  the  generation  of  women  past. 
Most  women  of  my  acquaintance  are  either  sodden 
with  left-over  conventions,  or  blowsy  with  racing 
after  the  to-be,  but  Effie  is  compacted,  tucked  in, 
detached  from  but  distinctly  related  to  her  back 
ground  of  Montecito.  She  was  president  of  the 
Woman's  Club,  chairman  of  the  book  committee 
of  the  circulating  library,  and  though  she  had  a  letter 
every  morning  and  a  telegram  every  night  from  the 
woman  with  whom  she  had  left  her  two  babies,  it 
didn't  prevent  hjer  in  the  week  she  spent  with  me, 
from  getting  into  touch  with  more  Forward  Move 
ments  than  I  was  aware  were  in  operation  in 
New  York. 

"But,  good  heavens,  Effie,  how  can  you  find  time 
for  them?  It's  as  much  as  I  can  do  to  attend  to  my 
own  job." 

"Oh,  you!    You're  a  forward  movement  yourself. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  455. 

All  I  am  doing  is  herding  the  others  up  to  keep  step 
with  you.  You  know,  Olivia,  I've  wondered  if  you 
didn't  feel  lonely  at  times,  so  far  ahead  that  you  don't 
find  anybody  to  line  up  with.  Every  time  I  see  a 
woman  step  out  of  the  ranks  in  some  achievement  of 
her  own,  I  think,  'Now,  Olivia  will  have  company." 

"But,  heavens!"  I  said  again.  "I'm  not  think 
ing  of  the  others  at  all.  I  don't  even  know  that  there 
are  others,  or  at  least  who  they  are.  I'm  a  squirrel 
in  a  cage.  I  go  round  because  I  must.  I  don't 
know  what  comes  of  it." 

"I'll  tell  you  what  comes  —  women  everywhere 
getting  courage  to  live  lives  of  their  own.  Do  you 
remember  what  you  went  through  in  Higgleston? 
Well,  the  more  women  there  are  like  you,  the  less 
there  will  be  of  that  for  any  of  them.  It  is  the 
conscious  movement  of  us  all  toward  liberty  that's 
going  round  with  you."  I  was  dashed  by  the 
breadth  and  brightness  of  her  view. 

"Effie,"  I  said,  "is  this  a  new  kind  of  toy  to  dangle 
before  your  intelligence  to  keep  it  from  realizing  it 
isn't  getting  anywhere?" 

"Like  the  love  affairs  of  your  friends?"  she  came 
back  at  me  promptly.  "No,  it  isn't;  it's  —  well,  I 
guess  it's  a  religion." 

I  believed  as  I  dressed  at  the  theatre  that  night, 
that  it  was  the  contagion  of  Effie's  enthusiasm  that 
keyed  me  up  to  a  pitch  that  I  thought  I  shouldn't 
have  reached  without  Helmeth.  I  had  counted  so 


456  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

on  his  being  there  for  the  first  night,  but  he  was 
still  in  London,  and  for  a  week  I  hadn't  heard  from 
him. 

I  needed  something  then  to  account,  as  I  proceeded 
with  my  part,  for  the  extraordinary  richness  of 
power,  the  delicacy  and  precision  with  which  I  put 
it  over  line  by  line  to  my  audience.  I  played,  oh, 
I  played!  I  felt  the  audience  breathing  in  the  pauses 
like  the  silent  wood;  the  lights  went  gold  and  crimson 
and  the  young  dreams  were  singing.  So  vivid  was 
the  mood  that,  when  from  time  to  time  I  was  swept 
out  on  billows  of  applause  before  the  curtain,  I 
fancied  I  saw  him  there,  leaning  to  me,  now  from  a 
balcony,  or  standing  unobserved  in  a  box  behind 
the  Sandersons'  and  some  friends  of  his  who  had 
pleased,  on  his  introduction,  to  take  a  great  interest 
in  me.  It  was  a  wonderful  night,  flooded  with  the 
certainty  of  success  as  by  a  full  moon;  we  danced 
under  it  in  spirit  —  I  believe  that  Polatkin  kissed  me; 
two  of  my  young  men  I  saw  with  their  hands  on  one 
another's  shoulders,  capering  in  the  wings  as  I  was 
being  drawn  before  the  curtain  again  and  again  to 
bob  and  smile  like  a  cuckoo  out  of  a  clock,  striking 
the  perfect  hour.  And  through  it  all  was  the  sense 
of  my  beloved,  the  leaf -light  touch  of  his  kiss  on  my 
cheek,  the  pressure  of  his  arm,  so  poignant  that  as  I 
came  out  of  the  theatre  late  with  Effie  and  her 
husband,  I  thought  I  could  not  bear  it  to  go  back  to 
my  room  and  find  it  empty. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  457 

"Willis,"  I  said  to  my  brother-in-law,  "you  must 
lend  me  my  sister  to-night."  I  was  sitting  be 
tween  them  in  the  carriage,  each  of  them  holding  a 
hand.  I  do  not  know  what  they  were  able  to  get  of 
my  acting,  but  nothing  could  have  kept  from  them 
the  knowledge  of  my  tremendous  success.  I  could 
see  though,  that  in  his  excited  state  it  wasn't  going 
to  be  easy  for  him  to  spare  his  young  wife,  and  that 
made  it  easier  for  me  as  we  drew  up  hi  front  of  my 
door  to  change  my  mind  suddenly  and  send  her  back 
with  him.  What  really  influenced  me  was  the  cer 
tainty  that  I  could  not  bear  even  for  Effie  to  disturb 
the  sense  of  my  lover's  presence  which  I  seemed  to 
feel  brooding  over  the  room.  I  went  up  the  steps 
warm  with  it 

I  had  a  moment  of  thinking  as  I  opened  the  door 
and  found  the  lights  turned  on,  that  my  maid  had 
left  them  so  in  anticipation  of  my  return,  and  then 
I  saw  him.  He  was  sitting  by  the  dying  fire; 
he  had  not  heard  me  come  up  the  stair,  for  his 
head  was  in  his  hands.  He  turned  then  at  my 
exclamation,  and  I  had  time,  before  we  crossed  the 
width  of  the  room  to  one  another,  to  think  that  the 
attitude  in  which  I  had  found  him  and  the  new 
writing  of  anxiety  in  his  face,  as  he  turned  it  to  me, 
had  its  source  in  his  finding  me  in  what  looked  like  a 
permanent  relation  to  a  theatre  of  my  own.  For  a 
moment  I  thought  that,  and  then  my  apprehension 
was  buried  on  his  breast. 


458  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Oh,  my  love,  my  love!"  He  held  me  off  from 
him  to  let  his  eyes  rove  tenderly  over  my  face,  my 
breast,  my  hair.  I  do  not  know  if  he  remembered 
the  words  he  had  spoken  to  me  so  long  ago,  or  if 
they  came  spontaneously  to  the  command  of  the 
old  desire :"  Oh,  you  beauty  —  you  wonder  .  .  .  .  ' 

Presently  we  moved  to  sit  down,  and  stumbled 
over  his  bag  upon  the  floor  beside  his  chair.  It 
brought  me  back  to  the  miracle  of  his  being  there 
and  to  the  certainty  that  he  must  have  come  to  me 
direct  from  the  steamer. 

"On  the  Cunarder,"  he  admitted,  "six  days  and 
a  half.  O  Lord!"  His  gesture  was  expressive 
of  the  extreme  weariness  of  impatience.  "I  came 
ashore  with  the  quarantine  officers.  I  couldn't 
cable.  I  left  at  two  hours'  notice. " 

It  occurred  to  me  that  he  must  have  at  least  come 
ashore  before  sunset,  and  in  that  case  he  couldn't- 
have  come  straight  to  me.  I  began  to  feel  something 
ominous  in  the  presence  there  of  his  bag.  His  over 
coat,  though  the  evening  was  so  warm,  lay  beyond 
him  on  another  chair.  It  flashed  over  me  in  a  wild 
way  that  he  had  come  to  some  sudden  determination 
—  he  had  been  at  the  theatre  that  night  —  he  had 
taken  my  being  there  in  that  circumstance  as  final  — 
perhaps  he  meant  to  abandon  me  to  my  art,  to  sur 
render  me  at  least  to  its  more  importunate  claim. 
He  followed  my  thought  dully  from  far  off. 

"I  was  at  the  theatre  in  time  for  your  part,"  he 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  459 

said.  "There  wasn't  a  seat,  but  they  knew  me  at 
the  box  office  and  let  me  in. " 

"Then  it  was  you  that  I  saw  in  the  balcony,  and  in 
Sanderson's  box?  I  thought  it  was  a  vision. " 

"I  had  business  with  Sanderson."  He  turned 
back  to  what  was  beginning  to  make  itself  felt 
through  his  profound  preoccupation,  the  charm  of 
my  presence.  "There  was  that  in  your  acting  to 
night  that  would  have  evoked  visions,"  he  smiled. 
"I  had  them  myself."  I  knelt  down  on  the  floor 
beside  his  knees. 

"Helmeth,  tell  me,"  I  begged.  He  began  to 
stroke  my  face  with  his  hand. 

"It  doesn't  seem  so  bad  as  it  did  a  few  moments 
ago,  and  yet  it  is  bad  enough.  I  must  leave  for 
Mexico  in  an  hour. " 

"Leave  me?"  I  was  still,  in  my  mind,  occupied 
with  what  now  began  to  seem  a  monstrous  disloyalty 
to  him,  my  obligation  to  Polatkin.  There  had  been  a 
great  deal  about  our  new  venture  on  the  programme, 
even  if  he  hadn't  seen  the  papers,  he  must  have 
learned  it  as  soon  as  he  came  into  the  theatre. 

"Unless  you  can  go  with  me  in  an  hour  .  .  .  yes, 
my  dear,  I  know  it  is  impossible  .  .  .  ."  He  was 
silent  a  while,  clasping  and  unclasping  my  hand  on 
his  knee,  knitting  his  brows  and  staring  into  the  fire 
with  the  expression  of  a  man  so  long  occupied  with 
anxiety  that  his  mind,  in  any  moment  of  release,  goes 
back  to  it  automatically.  I  stirred  presently  when 


460  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

I  saw  that  his  perplexity  had  nothing  to  do  with  me. 
"I  had  a  cable  in  London,"  he  said.  "Heaven  only 
knows  how  long  they  were  getting  it  down  to  the 
coast  where  they  could  send  it;  they  have  struck 
water  in  the  mines. "  I  failed  to  get  the  force  of  the 
announcement  except  that  from  the  manner  of  his 
telling  it,  it  was  a  great  disaster.  "I  must  leave  on 
the  twelve  twenty-three,"  he  warned  me.  I  did 
understand  that. 

"Oh,  no,  no!  Helmeth!"  I  cried  out.  "Not 
now  .  .  .  not  so  soon!"  I  clung  to  him  crying. 
"Stay  with  me  to-night  .  .  .  just  for  to-night!'* 
We  rocked  in  one  another's  arms.  I  remember 
little  broken  snatches  of  explanation. 

"I've  worked  so,  Olivia  .  .  .  I've  worked  and 
sweated  .  .  .  and  now  .  .  .  ."  Presently  he  broke 
out  again.  "To  have  worked,  and  know  that  your 
work  is  sound,  and  to  be  played  a  trick,  to  lose  by 
a  ghastly  trick !  If  there  is  a  God,  Olivia,  why  does 
He  play  tricks  on  a  man  like  that?" 

"Hush,  my  dear!     Oh,  my  dear  ..." 

"Do  you  know  what  I've  been  doing  since  I  came 
ashore  ?  I've  been  buying  pumps,  Olivia,  pumps, 
and  machinery  to  work  them.  Think  of  the  delay; 
and  I'll  have  to  ask  Shane  for  more  money  .  .  . 
more  .  .  .  and  I  meant  to  be  paying  dividends." 
He  held  me  off  from  him  fiercely  with  both  hands. 
"Olivia,  suppose  to-night  instead  of  applause  you 
had  heard  hisses,  and  people  going  out,  turning 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  461 

their  backs  on  you  in  your  best  lines  .  .  .  oh  .  .  ." 
He  broke  off  and  covered  his  face  with  his  hands.  I 
crept  up  to  him. 

"If  they  had,  I  should  have  come  back  to  you, 
beloved.  And  I  shouldn't  have  remembered  it. 
Oh,  beloved,  what  are  all  things  worth  except  that 
they  give  us  this?"  I  was  on  his  knee  now,  and  my 
hair  was  still  in  its  maiden  snood  as  it  had  been  in  the 
play.  I  drew  it  softly  about  his  face. 

"Oh,  my  dear,  to  be  this  to  me,  what  does  it 
matter  about  the  mines?  They  will  come  straight 
again  in  a  little  time.  But  this  .  .  .  this  is  now."  I 
could  feel  the  yielding  in  his  frame.  He  was  my 
man  and  I  did  what  I  would  with  him. 


CHAPTER  VH 

AMONG  all  the  devices  with  which  we  confound  the 
Powers  forever  fumbling  at  our  lives,  none  must 
puzzle  them  more  than  the  set  of  obligations  and 
interactions  that  go  by  the  name  of  business.  Un 
less,  indeed,  there  is  a  god  of  business,  which  I 
doubt. 

Past  all  misguiding  of  our  youth,  past  all  time  and 
distance  and  unlikelihood,  the  god  who  would  be 
worshipped  most  by  the  welding  of  spirit  into  spirit, 
had  brought  us  two  together  only  to  be  rived  apart 
by  the  necessity  which  tied  us  each,  not  only  to  our 
own,  but  to  other  people's  means  of  making  a  living. 
The  two  or  three  hours  following  on  Helmeth's 
announcement  of  the  accident  which  had,  who  knows 
but  at  the  instance  of  the  Powers  which  was  bent  upon 
uniting  us,  shattered  the  point  of  his  attachment  to 
the  Mexican  scheme,  we  spent  in  that  drowning 
realization  of  the  source  of  being  and  delight  for  each 
in  the  other,  which  is  the  process  and  the  end  of  lov 
ing.  And  then  the  withdrawing  of  whole  electric 
constellations  from  the  city  skyline  and  the  clatter 
of  the  morning  traffic  in  the  street,  and  the  dispersing 
blueness,  let  in  with  them  the  considerations  which 
whipped  us  apart. 

462 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  463 

If  there  is  a  god  of  business  he  is  of  a  superior 
subtlety,  for  even  then  we  proposed  to  one  another 
that  the  best  way  of  being  quit  of  the  obligation  was 
to  serve  our  time  to  it;  and  it  was  in  pursuance  of 
some  such  idea  that  I  found  myself,  toward  the  latter 
part  of  June,  going  out  to  Los  Angeles  to  meet  Mr. 
Garrett  who  would  by  that  time,  have  come  up  the 
coast  from  Mazatplan  to  make  purchases  of  supplies. 
I  should  have  gone  much  farther  than  that  merely  to 
have  touch  with  him,  the  warm  pressure  of  his  hand, 
his  voice  at  my  ear;  all  my  dreams  even,  were  tinged 
by  the  loss  out  of  my  life  of  his  bodily  presence.  It 
was  a  singular  flame-touched  circumstance  that  the 
assured  success  of  my  new  venture  set  up  in  me  a 
fiercer  need. 

There  had  not  been  time  for  much  in  his  letters 
but  accounts  of  his  struggle  with  conditions  at  the 
mine  and  his  slow  conquest  of  the  water  that  flooded 
all  the  lower  levels,  of  disheartening,  incompetent 
labour  and  the  multiplied  difficulty  of  distance  from 
any  base  of  supplies.  But  that  little  was  all  timed  to 
our  meeting  again.  "I  will  explain  all  that  when  I 
see  you,"  "We  will  talk  of  that  later,"  were 
phrases  that  cropped  out  in  his  letters  many  times. 
I  did  not  know,  even  in  the  act  of  going  there,  just 
what  he  expected  to  bring  to  pass  in  our  affairs  by  my 
being  in  Los  Angeles.  I  only  know  that  I  wanted 
desperately  to  see  him. 

One  thing  I  gathered  from  his  letters,  that  in  the 


464  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

preoccupation  and  haste  of  his  stay  in  New  York  he 
had  wholly  missed  the  significance  of  my  new  en 
tanglement  with  Morris  Polatkin.  I  have  to  sup 
pose,  to  account  for  his  never  having  any  other  con 
ception  of  what  my  work  was  to  me,  that  he  had 
never  known  a  professional  woman  or  one  who  worked 
at  anything  except  as  a  stop-gap  between  the  incon 
sequence  of  youth  and  marriage.  He  felt  himself, 
humbly,  rather  a  poor  substitute  for  the  colour,  the 
excitement  and  gayety  of  my  career  —  why  should 
so  many  people  suppose  that  an  actress's  life  is  gay 
—  but  he  balanced  that  with  what  he  meant  to  pur 
chase  for  me  by  his  own  achievement.  He  had, 
without  thinking  it  necessary  to  account  for  it,  the 
idea  that  is  so  generally  and  unexcusedly  entertained 
that  I  am  sometimes  hypnotized  into  thinking  it 
must  be  the  right  one,  that  a  woman  in  becoming  a 
man's  wife  ceases  to  be  her  own  and  becomes  some 
how  mysteriously  and  inevitably  his.  It  was  not 
that  in  all  our  talk  about  it,  he  had  any  conclusions 
about  the  stage  as  an  unsuitable  profession  for 
women,  but  that  he  was  inherently  unable  to  think 
of  it  as  possible  for  his  wife.  We  were  saved  from 
dispute  by  the  proof  I  had  had  in  Italy  that  his  in 
ability  to  think  of  me  as  having  a  life  apart,  arose 
chiefly  in  his  need  of  me,  which  had  in  it  something 
of  the  absolute  quality  of  a  child's  need  of  its 
mother.  I  am  glad  now,  in  view  of  all  that  came  of 
it,  that  I  was  spared  the  bitterness  of  not  seeing,  in 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  465 

his  inability  to  accept  the  finality  of  my  relation  to 
my  work,  anything  nobler  than  an  insufferable  male 
egotism. 

I  have  thought  since,  that  we  might  have  made 
more  of  our  love,  if  we  had  but  seen  somewhere  in  the 
world  the  process  of  its  being  so  made; if  we  could  have 
moved  for  a  time  in  a  footing  of  intimacy  among  other 
pairs  who  had  produced  out  of  as  unlikely  material, 
a  competent  and  satisfying  frame  of  life.  We  did  not 
know  any  but  theatrical  people  among  whom  the 
wife  had  interests  apart  from  her  husband.  That  is 
where  Taylorville  betrayed  us.  And  now  you  know 
what  I  meant  when  I  said  in  the  beginning  that  the 
social  ideal  in  which  I  was  bred  is  the  villain  of  my 
plot;  for  we  wished  sincerely  for  the  best,  and  the 
best  that  we  knew  was  cast  only  in  one  mould.  I 
have  begun  to  think  indeed,  that  this,  more  than  any 
thing  else,  accounts  for  the  personal  disaster  which 
waits  so  often  on  the  heels  of  genius  that  we  assume 
it  to  be  the  inalienable  condition.  For  genius  tends 
to  spring  from  that  stratum  of  society  for  which, 
when  it  has  come  to  its  full  flower,  it  is  most  unfit, 
and  it  comes  up  slanting  and  aside  like  a  blade  of 
grass  under  a  potsherd  of  the  broken  mould  of  un 
related  ideals.  Somewhere  there  must  have  been 
men  and  women  working  out  our  situation  and  work 
ing  it  out  successfully,  but  the  only  example  life 
afforded  us  was  not  of  the  acceptable  pattern.  Still 
my  agreement  with  Mr.  Garrett,  that  it  was  after  all 


466  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  pattern,  saved  us  from  mutual  accusation  and 
recrimination. 

Concerned  as  I  was  to  make  the  most  and  the  best 
of  him,  I  kept  looking  out  all  the  way  after  the  train 
struck  into  the  southwest,  for  every  intimation  of  the 
life  there  which  would  have  helped  me  to  get  at  the 
springs  of  his  behaviour;  and  was  by  turns  shocked 
away  from  its  bleakness  and  drawn  with  a  rush  of 
sympathy  toward  what  a  man  must  endure  to  live  in 
it.  If  I  saw  myself  as  he  had  sometimes  sketched 
me,  filling  its  bleak  and  unprofitable  reaches  with 
my  gift  as  with  flame  and  flower,  I  was  as  many  times 
shudderingly  brought  face  to  face  with  the  question 
as  to  how,  in  the  wilderness,  I  was  to  find  where 
withal  to  go  on  burning.  At  Los  Angeles,  a  town 
of  which  I  had  heard  him  speak  as  a  place  with  a 
spirit  with  which  he  was  in  sympathy,  I  had  nothing 
to  look  at  for  a  week  but  a  great  deal  of  rather 
formless,  wooden  architecture  expressing  nothing  so 
much  as  the  attempt  to  reconcile  Taylorvillian  tastes 
and  perceptions  with  a  subtropical  opportunity. 

I  do  not  know  what  that  city  may  have  become 
since  I  visited  it,  but  at  the  time  it  was  notable  for  a 
disposition  to  take  the  amplitude  of  its  pretension 
for  performance.  Its  theatrical  season,  if  it  had  any, 
had  dwindled  to  that  execrable  sort  of  entertainment 
which  comes  up  in  any  community  like  a  weed  when 
the  women  are  out  of  town;  and  if  there  had  been 
anybody  I  knew  there,!  should  have  been  debarred 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  467 

from  making  myself  known  to  them  until  I  had  seen 
Mr.  Garrett  and  learned  his  plans.  I  took  to  spend 
ing  my  time  as  far  out  of  town  as  I  could  manage, 
and  by  degrees  a  strange,  seductive  beauty  began  to 
make  itself  felt  with  me,  a  large,  unabashed  kind  of 
beauty  that  disdained  prettiness  and  dared  to  dis 
pense  with  charm.  It  was  a  land  ribbed  and  sinewed 
with  all  I  had  set  my  hand  to,  making  free  with  it  as 
kings  do  with  their  dignity,  and  the  moment  Hel- 
meth  came,  before  the  warmth  of  renewal  had  its  way 
with  us,  I  saw  that  the  land  had  set  its  mark  on  him. 
He  was  thinner,  his  manner  hurried,  obsessed. 
There  are  times,  no  doubt,  when  loving  must  be  set 
aside  for  the  sterner  business  of  living,  but  it  wasn't 
what  I  had  come  to  Los  Angeles  for.  I  was  flushed 
with  success,  I  had  spread  the  crest  of  my  femininity, 
I  was  prepared  to  be  adorable,  enchanting;  and  I 
found  that  what  was  expected  of  me,  was  to  sit  by  in 
my  room  in  the  hotel  on  the  chance  of  his  having 
time  for  me  between  the  exigencies  of  buying  cog 
wheels  and  iron  piping.  He  was  so  tired  at  times 
that  I  was  made  to  feel  that  my  demand  upon  him 
for  the  lover's  attitude  was  an  additional  harass 
ment.  And  there  was  so  little  else  I  could  do  for 
him!  Not  that  I  wouldn't  have  been  glad  to  have 
done  him  a  wifely  service,  laid  out  his  clothes  and 
seen  to  it  that  he  had  his  meals  regularly,  but  what 
I  could  do  was  subservient  to  the  necessity  of  keeping 
our  relation  secret.  It  struck  witheringly  on  all  my 


468  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

sweet  illusion  of  what  I  could  be  to  him,  to  have  it 
so  brought  home  to  me  that  the  uses  of  affection  are 
largely  dependent  on  the  habit  of  living  together. 

"At  any  rate,"  I  said,  consoling  myself  for  his 
scant  hours  with  me,  "we  shall  have  all  day  Sunday 

together.  Helmeth,  you  don't  mean  to  say " 

something  curiously  like  embarrassment  suffused  him. 

"I  shall  have  to  spend  most  of  Sunday  at  Pasadena 
...  at  the  Howards'  .  .  .  the  girls  are  there,  you 
know."  I  didn't  know,  and  the  circumstance  of  its 
having  been  kept  from  me  smacked  of  offence.  Why, 
since  I  had  been  good  enough  to  come  all  this  dis 
tance  to  comfort  him  with  loving,  had  he  not  ex 
plained  to  me  that  I  must  share  him  with  the  chil 
dren;  .  .  .  why  not  have  at  least  included  me  in  a 
community  of  interest  with  them? 

"I  thought,"  he  extenuated,  "that  the  girls  were 
the  chief  obstacle  to  your  marrying  me;  that  you 
might  get  to  feel  differently  about  them  if  you  didn't 
have  them  thrust  too  much  upon  you." 

"Oh,  Helmeth!"  I  began  to  imagine  a  perversity 
in  his  avoidance  of  the  main  issue.  "It  isn't  the 
girls  —  it  isn't  anything  of  yours,  it  is  something  of 
mine.  It  is  my  art  you  aren't  willing  for  me  to 
bring  into  the  family  with  me. " 

"It  is  because,  then,  I'm  not  accustomed  to  think 
of  the  stage  as  being  the  sort  of  thing  that  belongs 
in  a  family.  I  thought  you  agreed  with  me  about 
that?" 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  469 

He  had  me  there;  if  I  had  seen  a  way  to  separate 
all  that  I  loved  in  my  art,  from  all  that  was  most 
objectionable  in  the  practice  of  it,  I  should  have 
married  him  and  trusted  to  carrying  my  point  after 
ward.  I  had  a  vision  of  Helmeth's  girls  overhearing 
Polatkin  advising  me  about  the  fit  of  my  corsets,  and 
me  calling  him  Poly.  I  came  back  on  another  path 
to  my  recently  awakened  resentment. 

"Just  the  same  you  ought  to  have  told  me.  Mrs. 
Howard  is  Miss  Stanley's  sister,  isn't  she?" 

"They  don't  live  together."  He  had  answered 
my  unspoken  question,  as  though  the  ideas  that  were 
forming  in  my  head  had  been  in  juxtaposition  in  his 
own  before.  "Miss  Stanley  and  the  young  brother 
—  you  remember  him  at  Cadenabbia?  —  live  at  the 
old  place.  She  has  been  a  mother  to  him. " 

"Ah,"  I  couldn't  forbear  to  suggest,  "and  she's 
mothering  your  children  now. " 

"Good  heavens,  Olivia!  you  are  not  jealous,  are 
you?" 

"Yes,  I  am,"  I  told  him.  "I'm  jealous  of  every 
minute  you  spend  away  from  me.  I'm  jealous  of 
the  men  you  do  business  with,  men  who  can  talk  with 

you,  hear  your  voice.  Oh,  my  dear,  my  dear -" 

I  put  my  hands  up  to  his  shoulders  and  cried  a  little 
upon  his  breast;  his  arms  were  about  me;  for  me  all 
time  and  place  dissolved  only  to  keep  them  there. 

"Look  here,  Olivia,  if  you  feel  this  way,  let  us 
go  and  be  married  to-day  and  then  we  can  spend 


470  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

Sunday  all  together.  I  did  not  mean  to  urge  you 
just  now;  things  are  pretty  rough  with  me;  it  will  be  a 
year  or  two  before  I  can  straighten  them  out,  but, 
after  all,  I  guess  our  feelings  count  for  something. " 

"I  couldn't,"  I  protested,  "you  don't  understand; 
there's  Polatkin  and  Jerry;  he  has  written  this  play 
for  me,  we  are  all  tied  up  together;  you  know  how  it 
would  be  if  any  of  your  partners  should  withdraw. " 

"A  woman  has  no  business  to  be  tied  up  to  any 
man  but  her  husband — "  he  broke  out,  "think  of 
any  other  man  being  able  to  tell  my  wife  what  she 
should  or  shouldn't  do ! "  We  went  over  that  ground 
again  until  we  ceased  from  sheer  exhaustion. 

It  came  to  this  at  last,  that  he  proposed  that  I 
should  marry  him  at  once;  I  could  go  back  to  Mexico 
with  him.  I  hadn't  to  begin  rehearsals  until  Sep 
tember;  we  could  have  the  summer  together  and  then 
I  could  go  back  to  my  work  until  he  could  claim  me. 

For  a  wild  moment  I  yielded  to  the  suggestion 
...  if  I  could  have  him  and  my  art  .  .  .  but  I 
hope  I  am  not  altogether  a  cad.  I  saw  what  all  his 
efforts  could  not  keep  me  from  seeing,  that  even  to 
do  that  for  me,  to  get  me  into  his  place  in  Mexico 
and  back  again  would  be  a  tax  on  him,  and  to  ask 
him  to  do  it  with  a  reservation  in  my  mind  would  be 
more  than  I  would  stand  for. 

"It  isn't  fair,  Helmeth,  my  letting  you  think  that 
anything  could  pull  me  away  from  the  stage.  It 
isn't  that  I  don't  agree  with  you  about  how  a  hus- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  471 

band  and  wife  ought  to  be  with  one  another,  nor  that 
I  am  not  entirely  of  the  opinion  that  the  atmosphere 
of  the  stage  is  not  the  place  to  bring  up  children  the 
way  you  want  yours  brought  up;  it  is  because  not 
even  the  kind  of  marriage  you  offer  me  would  hold 


me.'3 


"You  mean  that  you'd  leave  me?  That  you'd  go 
back  to  it?" 

"Well,  why  not?  I  left  my  first  husband.  I 
know  that  wasn't  the  way  it  seemed  to  me  then,  but 
that's  what  it  amounted  to  ...  and  he  fell  in  love 
with  the  village  dressmaker. "  I  had  never  told  him 
that  part  of  my  life;  I  had  never  thought  of  it  in  the 
terms  in  which  I  had  just  stated  it,  I  saw  him  grow 
slowly  white  under  the  sun-brown  of  his  skin. 

"I  see  ...  if  your  only  idea  in  staying  with  me  is 

that  I  might Good  God,  Olivia,  do  you  know 

what  you've  said  to  me?" 

"Nothing  except  what  is  right  for  you  to  know. 
Do  you  remember,  Helmeth,  what  I  told  you  Mark 
Eversley  called  me?" 

"  A  Woman  of  Genius ;  I  remember."  He  was  look 
ing  at  me  now  as  though  the  phrase  were  a  sort  of 
acid  test  which  brought  out  in  me  traits  unsuspect 
ed  before. 

"Well,  then,  I'm  those  two  things,  a  woman  and  a 
genius,  and  the  woman  was  meant  for  you;  don't 
think  I  don't  know  that  and  am  not  proud  of  it  with 
every  fibre  of  my  brain  and  body.  I  should  have 


472  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

been  glad  once;  if  it  were  possible  I'd  be  glad  now  to 
have  kept  your  house  and  borne  your  children,  and 
see  to  it  that  they  brushed  their  teeth  and  had  hair 
ribbons  to  match  their  clothes. " 

"Their  mother  thought  that  was  important." 
He  snatched  at  this  as  at  an  incontestable  evidence  of 
my  being  all  that  I  was  trying  to  show  him  that  I  was 
not. 

"It  is  important  .  .  .  I  remember  to  this  day  the 

effect  on  me  of  my  hair  ribbons "  He  broke  in 

eagerly. 

"If  you  can  see  that  .  .  .  if  you  understand  what 
their  mother  wanted  .  .  .  things  I  missed  out  of  my 
life  through  having  no  mother,  that  I've  heard  you 
say  you  missed  partly  out  of  yours  .  .  .  birthdays 
and  Christmas  and  good  chances  to  marry  when 
they  grow  up " 

"I  do  understand,  Helmeth,  but  what  I'm  trying 
to  tell  you  is  that  I  can't  go  through  with  it.  Those 
are  the  things  that  belong  to  the  woman,  that  it  takes 
all  the  woman's  time  to  do  the  way  their  mother 
would  have  them  done;  and  for  me  the  woman  has 
been  swamped  in  the  genius.  Oh,  I  don't  say  that 
I'm  not  a  better  actress  for  having  tried  so  long  to  be 
merely  a  woman,  for  being  able  even  now,  to  know  all 
that  you  mean  when  you  say  'woman';  but  there  it  is. 
I  am  an  actress  and  I  can't  leave  off  being  one  just  by 
saying  so. " 

"And  I  can't  leave  off  being  a  proper  father  to 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  473 

my  girls.  I  owe  them  the  things  we've  been  talking 
about  just  as  I  owe  them  a  living.  I  suppose  I 
should  have  married  for  their  sakes,  supposing  I 
could  get  anybody  to  have  me,  even  if  I  hadn't  found 
you.  And  I  don't  want  finding  you  to  mean  any 
thing  but  the  best  to  them. "  I  had  nothing  to  say 
to  that,  and  he  went  back  to  a  thought  that  had  often 
been  between  us.  "We  ought  to  have  married  when 
we  were  young,"  he  insisted  as  though  somehow 
that  made  a  better  case  of  it,  "if  you  hadn't  begun 
you  wouldn't  have  been  called  on  to  leave  it  off. " 

"The  point  is  that  it  won't  leave  me.  Genius  — 
I  don't  know  what  it  is  except  that  it  is  nothing  to  be 
conceited  about,  because  you  can't  help  it  —  isn't  a 
thing  you  can  pick  up  or  lay  down  at  your  pleasure; 
it's  a  possession." 

I  could  see  that  he  didn't  altogether  follow  me, 
that  he  was  not  very  far  removed,  and  that  only  by 
his  admiration  for  me,  from  the  Taylorvillian  idea 
that  to  speak  of  yourself  as  a  genius  was  to  pay  your 
self  an  unwarrantable  compliment,  and  that  the  most 
I  could  get  him  to  understand  of  the  meaning  of 
my  work,  was  what  grew  out  of  his  being  a  most 
competent  workman  himself.  He  went  back  to  the 
original  proposition. 

"Does  that  mean,  then,  that  you  are  not  going  to 
marry  me?" 

"It  means  that  I'm  riot  going  to  leave  the  stage 
to  do  it." 


474  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"It  seems  to  me  to  mean  that  you  don't  love  me 
as  you  have  professed  to.  Oh,  I  know  how  women 
love  .  .  .  good  women." 

"Helmeth!" 

"I  beg  your  pardon,  Olivia."  We  stood  aghast 
at  what  we  had  brought  upon  ourselves;  across  the 
breach  of  dissension  we  rushed  together  with  effacing 
passion.  After  all,  I  believe  I  should  have  gone  with 
him  if  he  had  had  the  wit  to  know  that  the  point  at 
which  a  woman  is  most  prepared  for  yielding  is  the 
next  instant  after  she  has  just  stated  the  insuperable 
objection.  Whether  he  knew  or  not,  the  whole  of 
his  outer  attention  was  taken  up  with  the  purchase  of 
pump  fittings. 

Understand  that  I  didn't  for  a  moment  suppose 
that  I  had  lost  him,  that  I  didn't  believe  anything 
but  that  I  could  go  to  him  at  any  moment  if  the 
whim  seized  me,  that  I  couldn't  in  reason  pull  him 
back  if  the  need  of  him  arose.  I  finished  out  my 
vacation  at  resorts  up  and  down  the  California  coast, 
warm  with  the  certainty  that  I  should  see  him  in 
New  York  the  next  winter. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  next  season  was  a  brilliant  one,  made  so  by  the 
strength  of  my  wanting  him,  and  by  the  sense  of  com 
pleteness  and  finality  which  came  to  me  out  of  the 
faith  that  we  had  been  ordained  to  be  lovers  from  the 
beginning.  It  began  to  seem,  in  the  fashion  in  which 
we  had  been  brought  together  as  boy  and  girl  and 
then  mated  in  ways  which,  creditable  as  they  had 
been,  yet  offered  no  obstacle  to  the  freshness  and 
vitality  of  our  passion,  that  we  had  been  guided  by 
that  intelligence  which  in  any  emergency  of  my  gift, 
I  felt  rush  to  save  it.  That  I  had  been  prevented 
from  any  absorbing  interest  until  it  had  grown  and 
flowered  in  me,  appeared  now  to  have  come  about  by 
direct  manipulation  of  the  Powers.  I  had  curious 
and  interesting  adventures  that  winter  in  the  farthest 
unexplored  territory  of  the  artistic  consciousness, 
which  tempt  me  at  every  turn  to  put  by  my  story  for 
the  purpose  of  making  them  plain  to  you,  and  I  am 
only  deterred  from  it  by  the  certainty  that  you 
couldn't  get  it  plain  in  any  case. 

A  few  days  ago  I  picked  up  a  copy  of  Dante  and 
found  myself  convicted  of  shallowness  in  never  having 
taken  his  passion  for  the  cold-blooded  Beatrice  seri 
ously,  by  finding  the  evidence  of  its  absolute  quality 

475 


476  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

in  the  circle  within  circle  of  his  hells  and  paradises, 
the  rhythm  of  aches  and  exaltations.  And  if  you 
couldn't  get  that  from  Dante,  how  much  less  from 
anything  I  might  have  to  say  to  you.  After  all  these 
years  I  do  not  know  what  is  the  relation  of  Art  to 
Passion,  but  I  have  experienced  it.  If  I  said  any 
thing  it  would  be  by  way  of  persuading  you  that 
loving  is  not  an  end  in  itself.  It  is  the  pull  upward 
to  our  native  heaven,  which  is  no  hymn-book  heaven, 
but  a  world  of  the  Spirit  wherein  things  are  made 
and  remade  and  called  good. 

What  I  made  out  of  it  at  that  time  was  the  material 
of  a  satisfying  success,  and  though  I  got  on  without 
him  much  better  than  I  could  have  expected,  the 
fact  that  after  all,  he  did  not  get  any  nearer  to  me 
than  the  Pacific  coast,  had  its  effect  in  the  year's 
adventures. 

That  I  missed  my  lover  infinitely,  that  I  was 
thinned  in  the  body  by  the  sheer  want  of  him,  that 
I  had  moments  of  mad  resolve,  of  passionate  self- 
abandoning  cry  to  him,  goes  without  saying.  One 
need  not  in  a  certain  society,  say  more  of  love  than 
that  one  has  it,  to  be  understood  as  well  as  if  one  dis 
played  a  yellow  ribbon  in  the  company  of  Orangemen, 
but  since  I  couldn't  say  it,  an  opinion  passed  current 
among  my  friends  that  I  was  working  too  hard  and 
in  need  of  a  holiday.  It  came  around  at  last  to 
Polatkin  himself  noticing  it,  though  I  believe  with  a 
better  understanding  of  the  reason  why  I  should  be 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  477 

restless  and  sleepless  eyed.  It  was  just  after  I  had 
heard  from  Helmeth  that  he  couldn't  possibly  hope 
to  be  in  New  York  for  another  year,  that  my  mana 
ger  suggested  that  it  might  be  good  business  policy 
for  me  to  play  a  short  tour  in  three  or  four  of  the 
leading  cities,  a  strictly  limited  season  which  would 
be  enough  to  whet  the  public  appetite  without  sat 
isfying  it. 

"What  cities?" 

I  believe  that  I  jumped  at  it  in  the  hope  somehow 
that  it  might  be  stretched  to  include  Los  Angeles, 
where  Helmeth  was  at  that  moment,  and  where  I 
felt  sure  he  would  come  to  me.  When  I  learned, 
however,  that  nothing  was  contemplated  farther 
west  than  Chicago,  I  lost  interest.  That  very  day  I 
had  a  telegram: 

"Will  you  marry  me? 

"Signed:    GARBETT." 

It  was  dated  at  Los  Angeles,  and  as  I  could  think 
of  no  reason  for  this  urgency,  I  concluded  that  it 
must  be  because  the  association  there  with  the  idea 
of  me,  had  been  too  much  for  him,  and  in  that  new 
yielding  of  mine  to  the  beguiling  circumstance,  I  was 
disposed  to  interpret  it  as  evidence  that  he  was 
coming  round.  I  wired  back: 

"If  you  marry  my  work. 

"OLIVIA." 


478  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

and  prepared  myself  for  the  renewal  of  that  dear 
struggle  which,  if  it  got  us  no  further,  at  least 
involved  us  in  coil  upon  coil  of  emotion,  making  him 
by  the  very  force  he  spent  on  it,  more  completely 
mine.  I  expected  him  in  every  knock  on  the  door, 
every  foot  on  the  stair,  and  had  he  come  to  me  then, 
would  no  doubt  have  provoked  him  to  that  traditional 
conquest  which,  as  it  has  its  root  in  a  situation  made, 
affected  for  the  express  purpose  of  provocation,  is 
the  worst  possible  basis  for  a  successful  marriage. 

On  the  day  on  which  at  the  earliest,  I  could  have 
expected  him  from  Los  Angeles,  I  sent  my  maid 
away  in  order  that,  if  I  should  find  him  there  in  the 
old  place  waiting  for  me,  there  should  be  no  con 
straint  on  the  drama  of  assault  and  surrender  for 
which  I  found  myself  primed. 

Then  by  degrees  it  began  to  grow  plain  to  me  that 
he  did  not  mean  to  come,  that  the  question  and  my 
answer  to  it,  had  carried  some  sort  of  finality  to  his 
mind  that  was  not  apparent  to  mine.  By  the  time 
I  had  a  letter  from  him,  written  at  the  mine,  with  no 
reference  in  it  to  what  had  passed  so  recently  between 
us,  I  understood  that  he  would  not  ask  me  to  marry 
him  again.  He  had  accepted  the  situation  of  being 
my  lover  merely,  and  I  was  not  any  more  to  be 
vexed  by  the  alternative.  I  said  to  myself  that  it 
was  better  to  have  it  resolved  with  so  little  pain, 
and  that  it  should  be  my  part  to  see  that  what  we 
were  to  one  another  was  to  yield  its  proper  fruit  of 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  479 

happiness.  I  found  myself  at  a  loss,  however,  in  the 
application;  for  though  you  may  have  satisfied  your 
self  of  the  moral  propriety  of  dispensing  with  the 
convention  of  marriage,  you  cannot  very  well,  with 
a  week's  journey  between  you,  get  forward  in  the 
business  of  making  a  man  happy.  About  this  time 
Jerry  began  to  be  anxious  about  what  I  couldn't 
prevent  showing  in  my  face,  the  wasting  evidence 
of  love  divided  from  its  natural  use  of  loving. 

"You'll  break  down  altogether,"  he  expostulated, 
"and  then  where  will  I  be?"  He  was  tremendously 
interested  in  his  new  play,  which  was  by  far  the  best 
thing  he  had  done,  and  in  the  process  of  getting  it  to 
the  public  he  had  so  identified  it  with  my  interpre 
tation  that  he  was  no  longer  able  to  think  of  the  one 
without  the  other.  There  had  come  into  his  manner 
a  new  solicitude  very  pleasing  to  me,  born  of  his 
sense  of  possession  in  me,  in  as  much  as  I  was  the 
lovely  lady  of  his  play,  and  a  sort  of  awe  of  all  that 
I  put  into  it  that  transcended  his  own  notion  and  yet 
was  so  integral  a  part  of  it.  It  had  brought  him  out 
of  his  old  acceptance  of  me  as  a  foil  and  relief  for  the 
shallow  iridescence  that  other  women  produced  in 
him.  He  had  begun  to  have  for  me  a  little  of  that 
calculating  tenderness  with  which  a  man  might 
regard  the  mother  of  his  nursing  child.  Night  by 
night  then  as  he  came  hovering  about  me  he  could  not 
fail  to  observe,  though  he  could  hardly  have  under 
stood  it,  the  wearing  hunger  with  which  I  came  from 


480  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

my  work,  pushed  on  by  it  to  more  and  more  desper 
ate  need  of  loving,  and  drawn  back  by  its  unrelenting 
grip  from  the  artistic  ruin  in  which  the  satisfaction 
of  that  hunger  would  involve  me.  Now  at  his  very 
natural  expression  of  concern,  I  felt  myself  unac 
countably  irritated. 

"Jerry,"  I  demanded  of  him,  "would  it  matter 
so  much  if  we  left  off  altogether  writing  plays  and 
playing  them?  What  would  it  matter?" 

"You  are  in  a  bad  way  if  you've  begun  to  question 
that?  What  does  living  matter?  We  are  here  and 
we  have  to  go  on." 

"Yes,  but  when  we  go  on  at  such  pains?  Is  there 
any  more  behind  us  than  there  is  behind  a  ball  when 
it  is  set  rolling?  Are  we  aimed  at  anything?" 

"Oh,  Lord,  Olivia,  what  has  that  got  to  do  with 
it?"  He  was  sitting  in  my  most  commodious  chair 
with  his  long  knees  crossed  to  prop  up  a  manuscript 
from  which  he  was  reading  me  the  notes  of  a  tragedy 
he  was  about  to  undertake,  and  his  quills  were  almost 
erect  with  the  tweaking  he  had  given  them  in  the 
process  of  arriving  at  his  climax.  It  was  a  curious 
fact  that  the  breaking  off  of  his  marriage,  which  in 
the  nature  of  the  case  could  not  be  broken  off  sharp 
but  had  writhed  and  frayed  him  like  the  twisting  of  a 
green  stick,  by  setting  Jerry  free  for  those  light  ad 
ventures  of  the  affections  which  had  been  so  largely 
responsible  for  the  rupture  of  his  domestic  relations, 
instead  of  multiplying  his  propensity  by  his  oppor- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  481 

tunity,  had  landed  him  on  a  plane  of  self-realization 
in  which  they  were  no  longer  needful.  The  poet  in 
Jerry  would  never  be  able  to  resist  the  attraction  of 
youth  and  freshness,  but  the  man  in  him  was  forever 
and  unassailably  beyond  their  reach.  I  was  never 
more  convinced  of  this  than  when  he  turned  on  this 
occasion  from  the  preoccupation  of  his  creative  mood, 
to  offer  the  fruit  of  his  own  astringent  experience,  to 
bridge  across  the  chasm  of  my  spirit. 

"I  don't  see  why  it  is  important  that  we  should 
know  what  we  are  working  for;  we  might,  in  our  con 
founded  egotism,  not  approve  of  it,  we  might  even 
think  we  could  improve  on  the  pattern.  I  write 
plays  and  you  act  them  and  a  bee  makes  honey.  I 
suppose  there's  a  beekeeper  about,  but  that's  none  of 
our  business." 

"  Ah,  if  we  could  only  be  sure  of  that  —  if  He  would 
only  make  himself  manifest;  that's  what  I'm  look 
ing  for,  just  a  hint  of  what  He's  trying  to  do  with 


us." 


"Well,  I  can  tell  you:  He'll  smoke  you  out  of 
New  York  and  into  a  sanitarium,  if  you  don't  know 
enough  to  take  a  change  and  a  rest. " 

"Poly  wants  me  to  go  on  the  road  for  a  while;  sort 
of  triumphal  progress.  He  thinks  applause  will  cure 


me." 


"  You're  getting  that  now.     What  would  bring  you 
around  would  be  a  good  frost." 

"You  wouldn't  want  that  in  Chicago?"     Jerry 


482  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

disentangled  his  limbs  and  sat  up  sniffing  the  wind 
of  success. 

"If  I  could  have  you  to  open  with  my  play  in 
Chicago,"  he  averred  solemnly,  "I'd  be  ready  to 
sing  the  Lord  Dismiss  Us."  He  really  thought  so. 
To  go  back  to  the  scene  of  his  early  struggle  with  his 
laurels  fresh  on  him,  to  satisfy  the  predictions  of  his 
earliest  friends  and  confound  his  detractors,  above  all 
to  be  received  in  his  own  country  with  that  honour 
which  is  denied  to  prophets,  seemed  to  him  then 
almost  as  desirable  in  prospect  as  it  proved  in  fact 
not  to  be.  I  found  another  advantage  in  the  con 
fusion  and  excitement  of  touring,  in  being  able  to 
conceal  from  myself  that  I  hadn't  had  a  satisfactory 
letter  from  Helmeth  since  the  pair  of  telegrams  that 
passed  between  us,  and  no  letter  at  all  for  a  long  time. 
It  was  always  possible  to  pretend  to  myself  that  the 
letters  had  been  written  but  were  delayed  in  for 
warding. 

It  was  a  raw  spring  day  when  we  came  to  Chicago, 
the  promise  of  the  season  in  the  sun,  denied  and 
flouted  by  the  wind.  It  slanted  the  tails  of  the 
labouring  teams  and  cast  over  the  clean  furrow, 
handfuls  of  the  winter  rubbish  from  the  stubble 
yet  unturned,  and  between  field  and  field  it  wrung 
the  tops  of  the  leafless  wood.  Now  and  then  it 
parted  the  trees  on  white  painted  spires  without  dis 
turbing  them  or  the  rows  of  thin  white  gravestones. 
It  laid  bare  the  roots  of  my  life  to  the  cold  blasts 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  483 

of  memory,  it  rendered  me  again  the  pagan  touch, 
the  undivided  part  that  the  earth  had  in  me.  My 
dead  were  in  its  sod,  in  me  the  sap  of  its  spiritual 
fervours  and  renunciations.  What  was  I,  what  was 
my  art  but  the  flower,  the  bright,  exotic  blossom 
borne  upon  its  topmost  bough,  its  dying  top;  here 
in  its  abounding  villages,  in  the  deep-rutted  county 
roads  was  the  root  and  trunk.  Outside,  the  wind 
flicked  the  landscape  like  the  screen  of  the  moving 
picture  made  of  it,  by  the  swift  roll  of  the  train. 
I  felt  again  the  pressure  of  my  small  son  upon 
my  arm,  and  the  pleasant  stir  of  domesticity  and 
the  return  of  my  man.  For  the  last  hour  Jerry 
had  been  sitting  in  my  compartment,  opposite  me, 
and  staring  stonily  out  of  the  window;  now  and 
then  his  jaws  relaxed  and  set  again  as  he  bit  hard 
upon  the  bitter  end  of  experience.  No  one,  I  sup 
pose,  can  go  through  that  country  so  teeming  with 
the  evidences  of  the  common  life,  the  common 
labour,  the  common  hope  of  immortality,  and  not 
feel  bereft  in  as  much  as  the  circumstances  of  his 
destiny  divide  him  from  it.  We  passed  Higgleston; 
beyond  the  roofs  of  it  the  elms  that  marked  the 
cemetery  road,  gathered  green.  The  roofs  of  the 
town  were  steeped  in  windy  light.  I  had  no  im 
pulse  to  stop  there.  I  withdrew  from  it  as  one  does 
from  a  private  affair  upon  which  he  has  stumbled 
unaware.  Rather  it  was  not  I  who  withdrew,  but 
Life  as  it  was  lived  there,  turned  its  back  upon  me. 


484  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

Getting  in  to  Chicago  through  that  smoky  wooden 
wilderness,  within  which  the  city  obscures  itself  as  a 
cuttlefish  in  its  own  inky  cloud,  I  felt  again  the 
wounding  and  affront,  the  cold  shoulder  lifted  on  my 
needs,  the  eager  hand  stretched  out  to  catch  my 
contribution.  Chicago  received  me  with  its  hat  off, 
bowing  to  meet  me,  and  when  I  remembered  how 
nearly  it  had  let  me  fall  into  the  pit  prepared  for  me 
by  Griffin  and  the  "Flim  Flams,"  I  burned  with 
resentment. 

It  was  seven  years  now  since  I  had  seen  the  city 
or  Pauline,  the  only  friend  I  had  made  there  who 
could  be  supposed  to  take  an  interest  in  my  coming 
again.  I  meant  of  course  to  see  Pauline;  we  had 
kept  up  a  correspondence  which  with  the  years  had 
shown  a  disposition  to  confine  itself  to  a  Christmas 
reminder  and  an  occasional  marked  copy  of  a  maga 
zine,  but  I  meant,  of  course,  to  see  her.  I  had 
trusted  to  her  finding  out  through  the  newspapers 
that  I  would  be  there  and  on  such  a  date.  It  fell  in 
quite  naturally  with  my  inclination,  to  have  her 
card  sent  up  to  me  the  next  morning  a  little  after 
eleven.  I  was  needing  to  be  distracted.  On  my 
way  up  from  breakfast  I  had  met  Jerry  going  down 
with  his  suit  case. 

"Back  to  New  York,"  he  admitted  to  my  question, 
"as  quick  as  I  can  get  there." 

"But  with  all  this  success  .  .  .  why,  they 
fairly  stood  on  their  feet  last  night. " 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  485 

*'I  know,  I  know,"  he  looked  unendurably  har 
assed.  "I  can't  stand  it,  Olivia,  I  can't  stand  it. 
This  place  is  full  of  ghosts."  I  remembered  that 
both  his  children  had  been  born  there  and  that  he 
had  not  seem  them  for  more  than  a  year,  and  I  did 
not  press  him. 

"I'll  keep  your  end  up  for  a  week  if  I  can,"  I 
assured  him  as  he  wrung  my  hand.  He  turned  back 
when  he  was  a  step  or  two  down  the  stair. 

"Don't  stay  too  long  yourself,"  he  admonished. 
"New  York's  the  place." 

I  was  feeling  that  when  Pauline  came  to  me.  It 
wasn't  until  I  saw  her  that  I  realized  what  a  distance 
there  was  —  in  spite  of  our  common  youth,  had 
always  been  —  between  us.  It  started  out  for  us 
both  in  the  first  glimpse  we  had  of  one  another,  in 
the  witness  of  all  the  inconsiderable  elements  of 
line  and  colour  which  go  to  make  up  a  woman's 
appearance,  of  growth  and  amplitude  in  me  and 
fulfilment  in  hers.  Pauline  had  been  in  her  girl 
hood,  if  not  pretty,  at  least  what  is  known  as  an 
attractive  girl,  and  though  there  was  only  a  matter 
of  months  between  us,  it  came  to  me  with  a  shock 
that  she  was  now,  not  only  not  particularly  attrac 
tive,  but  middle-aged.  It  was  not  so  much  in  the 
fulness  under  her  chin  which  apparently  caused  her 
no  uneasiness,  nor  in  the  thickness  of  her  waist,  of 
which  I  was  sure  she  made  a  virtue,  but  hi  the  cer 
tainty  that  all  that  was  ever  to  happen  to  her  in  the 


486  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

way  of  illuminating  and  self -forgetting  passion,  had 
already  happened. 

She  had  reached,  she  must  have  reached  about  the 
time  I  was  taking  my  flight  upward  by  the  help  of 
Morris  Polatkin,  the  full  level  of  her  capacity  to  ex 
perience.  She  was  living  still,  as  I  saw  by  the  card 
which  I  still  held  in  my  hand,  in  Evanston,  and  she 
was  living  there  because  it  was  no  longer  within  the 
scope  of  her  possibility  to  live  anywhere  else.  All 
this  flashed  through  me  in  the  moment  in  which 
Pauline,  checked  by  what  she  was  able  to  guess  of 
unfamiliar  elements  in  me,  was  crossing  the  room  and 
taking  me  by  the  hands  in  the  old  womanly  way, 
keyed  down  to  the  certainty  of  not  requiring  it  in  her 
business  any  more.  It  was  so  patent  that  Pauline 
was  now  in  the  position  of  having  done  her  duty 
toward  life  and  Henry  Mills,  and  was  accepting  all 
that  came  to  her  from  it  as  her  due,  that  it  almost 
seemed  for  a  moment  that  she  had  said  something  of 
the  kind.  What  did  pass  between  us  besides  a  kiss  of 
greeting,  were  some  commonplaces  about  my  being 
there  and  how  pleased  Henry  and  the  children  would 
be  to  see  me.  We  sat  down  on  a  sofa  together  and 
for  a  moment  the  old  girlish  confidence  put  forth  a 
tender  sprig  of  renewal. 

"So  many  years  since  we  were  at  school  together! 
You've  gone  a  long  way  since  then,  Olivia." 

"A  long  way,"  I  admitted,  but  she  didn't  catch 
the  double  meaning  the  phrase  had  for  me. 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  487 

"Henry  and  I  were  talking  about  it  this  morning. 
And  the  times  you  had  here  in  Chicago,  you  poor 
dear;  you  had  to  make  a  good  many  starts  before 
you  got  on  the  right  road  at  last." 

"A  great  many." 

"But  you  found  out  that  it  all  came  right  in  the 
end,  didn't  you?  That  it  was  best  just  for  you  to 
trust  .  .  .  you  used  to  be  bitter  about  it  ...  but 
trusting  is  always  best." 

"Oh,  if  you  think  I've  been  trusting  all  these 
years  .  .  .  I've  been  working." 

"Of  course,  of  course."  Much  of  her  old  manner 
came  back  with  the  occasion  for  moralizing.  "But 
you  were  too  amusing,  you  were  quite  fierce  with 
Henry  because  he  wouldn't  do  anything  about  it." 
She  laughed  reminiscently.  "And  now,  you  see 
.  .  .  ."  Her  look  travelled  about  the  rose-coloured 
room,  full  of  the  eVidence  of  prosperity. 

"Pauline,"  I  said,  "if  you  are  thinking  that  I 
could  have  gone  to  New  York  and  become  the  suc 
cess  I  am,  without  the  help  that  you  and  Henry  might 
have  given  me,  you  are  making  a  great  mistake. 
What  did  happen  was  that  I  had  to  accept  it  from  a 
quarter  where  it  wasn't  so  much  to  be  expected,  and 
was  not  nearly  so  agreeable. " 

"That  man  Mark  Eversley  found  for  you,  you 
mean  P  Well,  I  suppose  you  did  get  on  better  for 
a  little  start." 

"Start!"  I  cried.    "Start!    I  had  to  have  every- 


488  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

thing  —  food  and  clothes. "  A  sudden  recollection 
flashed  upon  me  of  those  first  days  in  New  York, 
of  myself  become  merely  a  dummy  on  which  to 
hang  a  fat  little  Jew's  notions  of  acceptable  con 
tours;  the  offence  of  it;  the  greater  offence  from 
which  by  the  opportune  appearance  of  the  Jew  I 
had  so  hardly  escaped. 

"Have  you  any  idea,  Pauline,  what  it  means  to 
have  a  man  invest  money  in  you?  ...  a  man  like 
Polatkin.  I  was  his  property,  a  horse  he  had 
entered  for  the  race.  He  had  a  stake  on  me  ..." 

;• 

Pauline  looked  aghast;  vague  recollections  of  the 
actress  heroines  of  fiction  shaped  her  thought. 

"You  don't  mean  to  say,  Olivia,  that  you  —  that 
you  were " 

"His  mistress,"  I  finished  for  her  bluntly.  "Is 
that  the  only  thing  your  imagination  takes  offence 
at?  Isn't  it  enough  for  me  to  tell  ybu  that  he  orders 
my  corsets  for  me?"  That  did  reach  her.  I  could 
see  her  struggle  with  the  habitual  effort  to  put  the 
unwelcome  fact  down,  anywhere  out  of  sight  and 
knowledge,  under  the  cotton  wool  of  amoral  senti 
ment.  Even  now  if  she  could  escape  being  implicated 
in  my  predicament  by  avoiding  the  knowledge  of  it, 
she  would  not  only  do  that  but  convict  herself  of 
superiority  as  well.  My  gorge  rose  against  it. 

"But  if  I  didn't  sell  myself  to  the  Jew,"  I  drove  it 
home  to  her,  "it  was  chiefly  because  he  was  decenter 
to  me  than  the  circumstance  gave  me  a  right  to 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  489 

expect.  I  came  near  doing  it  for  a  cheaper  man  and 
for  a  cheaper  price,  a  man  who  had  deserted  one  wife, 
and  ...  a  bigamist  in  fact.  If  you  don't  know  that 
there  were  days  when  I  would  have  sold  myself  for 
something  to  eat,  it  was  because  you  didn't  take  the 
pains  to  know." 

"But  you  never  said  a  word.  Of  course  if  you  had 
told  me  the  truth  ..."  she  floundered  and  saved 
herself  on  what  she  believed  to  be  a  just  resentment; 
but  I  had  no  notion  of  letting  her  off  so  easily.  I  did 
not  know  exactly  how  we  had  got  launched  on  the 
subject,  it  had  not  been  in  my  mind  to  do  so  when 
she  came  in,  but  all  the  events  of  the  past  year 
seemed  to  lead  up  to  it,  to  come  somehow  to  the  point 
of  rupture  against  her  smooth  acceptance  of  my 
success  as  being  derived  from  the  same  process  as 
her  own. 

"I  did  tell  you  that  I  was  in  need  of  money  to  put 
me  in  the  way  of  earning  a  living,"  I  insisted.  "I 
did  not  ask  you  for  charity;  what  I  offered  you  was 
the  chance  of  a  business  investment,  one  that  ren 
dered  the  investor  its  due  return.  The  fact  that  you 
did  not  know  enough  about  the  business  to  know  how 
good  it  was"  —  I  forestalled  what  I  saw  rising  to  her 
lips  —  "had  nothing  to  do  with  it.  You  were  my 
friend  and  professed  to  admire  my  talent;  I  had  a 
right  to  have  what  I  said  about  it  heard  respect 
fully.  ",  I  had  got  up  from  the  pink  and  white  sofa 
where  our  talk  had  begun,  and  was  trailing  about 


490  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  room  in  my  breakfast  gown,  and  the  suggestion 
of  staginess  in  the  way  the  folds  of  it  followed  my 
movements,  irritated  me.  I  was  certain  that  the 
effect  of  it  on  Pauline  would  be  to  mitigate  the  sin 
cerity  of  what  I  said. 

"You'd  known  me  long  enough,  "  I  accused  her, 
"to  know  that  I  wouldn't  have  asked  for  money  until 
I  was  in  the  last  extremity,  and  then  I  wouldn't 
have  asked  it  for  myself.  I  don't  know  that  it  would 
have  mattered  if  I  had  starved,  but  my  Gift  was 
worth  saving." 

"I  didn't  dream  ..."  she  began.  "I  hadn't  any 
idea  ..." 

"Well,  why  didn't  you  ask  Henry,  then?  Henry 
knows  what  becomes  of  women  on  the  stage  when 
they  can't  make  a  living."  This  was  nearer  to  the 
mark  than  I  had  meant  to  let  myself  go,  but  I  could 
see  that  it  carried  no  illumination.  She  drew  up  her 
wrap  and  braced  herself  for  one  more  gallant  effort. 

"The  things  you've  been  through,  my  dear  .  .  . 
I  don't  wonder  you  feel  bitter.  But  when  it  has  all 
come  out  right,  why  not  forget  it?" 

"Oh,  right!    Right!" 

The  room  was  full  of  vases  and  floral  tokens  of  the 
triumph  of  the  night  before,  and  as  I  swung  about 
with  my  arms  out,  disdaining  her  judgment  of  right- 
ness  for  me,  I  knocked  over  a  great  basket  of  roses 
and  orchids  which  had  come  from  Cline  and  Erskine. 
I  don't  suppose  Pauline  had  ever  knocked  over  any- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  491 

thing  in  her  life,  and  the  violence  of  my  gesture  must 
have  stood  for  some  unloosening  of  the  bonds  of 
convention,  for  an  implication  which  only  now  be 
gan  to  work  through  to  her. 

"You  don't  mean  to  say,  Olivia,  that  you  .  .  . 
that  you  are  not  .  .  .  not  a  good  woman?" 

"Oh,"  I  said  again,  "good  .  .  .  good  .  .  .  what 
does  it  all  mean?  I'm  a  successful  actress. " 

"Olivia!" 

"Well,  no,  if  you  insist  on  knowing,  I'm  not  what 
you  would  call  a  good  woman. "  I  threw  it  at  her  as 
though  it  had  been  a  peculiar  kind  of  scorn  heaped  up 
on  her  for  being  what  I  had  just  denied  myself  to  be. 
I  saw  myself  for  once  with  all  my  thwarted  and  mis 
spent  instincts  toward  the  proper  destiny  of  women, 
enmeshed  and  crippled,  not  by  any  propensity  for 
sinning,  but  by  the  conditions  of  loving  which  women 
like  Pauline  set  up  for  me.  "And  if  you  want  to 
know,"  I  said,  "why  I'm  not  a  good  woman,  it  is 
because  women  like  you  don't  make  it  seem  partic 
ularly  worth  while." 

"Oh,  "she  gasped,  "this  is  horrible  .  .  .  horrible!" 
The  word  came  out  in  a  whisper.  I  saw  at  last  that 
she  was  done  with  me,  that  the  only  thought  that  was 
left  to  her  was  to  get  away,  to  put  as  much  space  as 
possible  between  us.  I  got  around  with  my  hand 
on  the  door  to  prevent  her. 

"Pauline,  Pauline!"  I  cried  almost  wildly,  as  if 
even  at  the  last  she  could  have  helped  me  from  my- 


492  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

self.  "Can't  you  remember  that  we  grew  up  to 
gether,  that  we  had  the  same  training,  the  same 
ideals?  Can't  you  remember  that  when  we  began  I 
thought  that  the  life  you  had  chosen  for  yourself  was 
the  best,  that  I  thought  I  had  chosen  it  for  myself 
too?  Only  —  for  heaven's  sake,  Pauline,  try  to 
understand  me  —  there  is  something  that  chooses 
for  us.  Don't  you  know  that  I  wouldn't  have  been 
any  different  from  what  you  are  if  I  hadn't  been 
forced?  Haven't  you  seen  how  I've  been  beaten 
back  from  all  that  I  tried  to  be?  All  this "  —  I  threw 
out  my  arms,  as  I  stood  against  the  door,  to  include 
all  that  had  entered  by  implication  in  our  conver 
sation —  "it  had  to  come,  and  it  came  wrong 
because  you  won't  understand  that  a  Gift  has  its 
own  way  with  us." 

I  could  see,  though,  that  she  wasn't  understanding 
in  the  least,  that  she  was  badly  scared  and  even 
indignant  at  being  forced  to  listen  to  a  justification 
of  what,  by  her  code,  was  wholly  unjustifiable.  She 
was  standing  not  far  from  me,  crushed  against  the 
wall,  as  though  by  the  weight  of  opprobriousness 
that  I  heaped  upon  her.  Her  whole  attention  was 
centred  on  the  door  and  the  chance  of  getting  out 
of  it  and  away  from  what,  in  the  mere  despair  of 
reaching  her  intelligence  with  it,  I  flung  out  from 
me  now  wildly. 

"I  suppose,"  I  scoffed,  "that  it  never  occurs  to 
you  that  a  gifted  woman  could  be  as  delicate  and 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  493 

feminine  as  anybody,  if  only  you  didn't  make  her 
right  to  fostering  care  and  protection  conditional  on 
her  giving  up  her  gift  altogether.  You, "  I  demanded, 
"who  tie  up  all  the  moral  values  of  living  to  your 
own  little  set  of  behaviours,  what  right  have  you  to 
deny  us  the  opportunity  to  be  loved  honestly  be 
cause  you  can't  at  the  same  time  make  us  over  into 
replicas  of  yourselves?" 

I  was  sick  with  all  the  shames  and  struggles  of  the 
women  I  had  known.  I  forgot  the  door  and  went 
over  to  her. 

"You,"  I  said,  "who  fatten  your  moral  supe 
riority  on  the  best  of  all  we  produce,  how  do  you 
suppose  you  are  going  to  make  us  value  the  standards 
you  set  up,  when  the  price  you  despise  us  for  paying, 
nine  times  out  of  ten  we  pay  to  the  men  who  belong 
to  you?  What  right  have  you  to. judge  what  we 
have  done  when  you've  neither  help  nor  under 
standing  to  offer  us  in  the  doing?  What  right  .  .  . 
what  right?"  For  the  moment  I  had  turned  away 
in  the  vehemence  of  my  indignation;  I  was  pacing  up 
and  down.  In  the  instant  when  my  attention  was 
distracted  from  the  door,  Pauline  made  a  dart  for  it. 
I  could  hear  her  scurrying  down  the  hall,  but  I  went 
on  walking^up  and  down  in  my  room  and  talking 
aloud  to  her.  I  was  beside  myself  with  the  sum  of  all 
indignities.  Was  it  not  this  set  of  prejudices  which 
for  the  moment  had  presented  itself  in  the  person  of 
Pauline  Mills,  which  at  every  turn  of  my  life  had 


494  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

been  erected  against  the  bourgeoning  of  my  gift? 
Was  it  not  in  the  process  of  combating  the  tradition 
of  the  preciousness  of  women  as  inherent  in  particular 
occupations,  that  I  had  lost  the  inestimable  precious- 
ness  of  myself?  Was  it  for  what  came  out  of  Paul 
ine's  frame  of  life  —  I  thought  of  Cecelia  Brune  here 
—  that  I  had  sacrificed  my  public  possession  of  the 
man  I  loved.  And  what  came  out  of  it  that  was 
more  to  the  world  than  what  I  had  to  offer?  Had  I 
cut  myself  off  from  the  comfort  and  stability  of  a 
home,  simply  because  in  my  situation  as  famous 
tragedienne  I  didn't  see  my  way  to  bring  up  Hel- 
meth's  children  so  as  to  make  little  Pauline  Millses  of 
them?  I  was  still  raging  formlessly  in  this  fashion 
when  Miss  Summers,  our  ingenue,  came  to  tell  me 
that  the  cab  waited  to  take  us  to  the  theatre  for  the 
matinee. 

All  through  the  performance,  which  I  was  told 
went  remarkably  well,  I  was  conscious  of  nothing  but 
the  seismic  shudders  and  upheavals  of  my  world  too 
long  subjected  to  strain.  It  came  back  on  me  in 
intervals  through  the  evening  performance;  I  was 
physically  sick  with  it.  But  by  degrees  through  its 
subsidence,  new  worlds  began  to  rise.  By  the  time 
I  left  the  theatre  that  night  I  knew  what  I  would 
do. 

It  had  been  a  mistake,  a  natural  but  cruel  mis 
take,  for  Helmeth  and  me  to  suppose  that  a  way  of 
living  could  at  any  time  be  worth  the  very  sap  and 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  495 

source  of  life.  Love  was  the  central  fact  around 
which  all  modes  and  occupations  should  arrange 
themselves.  Let  us  but  love  then,  and  live  as  we 
may.  In  all  the  world  there  was  no  need  like  the 
need  I  had  for  his  breast,  his  arm. 

Always  the  point  of  our  conclusions  had  been  that 
I  agreed  with  him,  that  I  had  thought  that  failing  to 
repeat  the  pattern  of  their  mother  in  his  children,  I 
had  failed  in  all.  I  didn't,  any  more  than  he,  see 
my  way  to  keeping  on  with  my  work  and  meeting 
him  at  the  door  every  night  when  he  came  home,  in 
the  sort  of  garment  that,  in  the  ladies'  journals,  went 
by  the  name  of  house  gown.  I  laughed  to  think 
that  we  had  not  seen  before  that  it  was  ridiculous, 
I  had  no  more  doubt  now,  no  more  trepidation. 
What  burned  in  me  was  so  clear  a  flame  that  he  could 
not  but  be  illuminated.  Only  let  me  find  him,  let  me 
go  to  him  again.  At  the  hotel  desk  where  I  paused 
for  my  key  I  asked  them  to  send  up  telegraph  blanks 
to  my  room.  With  them  came  letters  forwarded 
from  New  York.  I  started,  as  one  does  at  an  unex 
pected  presence,  to  find  an  envelope  among  them 
with  his  familiar  superscription.  For  the  first  time 
I  would  rather  not  have  had  a  letter  from  him;  it 
would  be  interposing  a  fresher  picture  between  me 
and  my  new  resolution,  put  him  for  the  moment 
farther  from  me. 

I  saw  then  that  the  letter  in  my  hand  had  been 
posted  at  Los  Angeles;  it  was  as  though  he  had  leaped 


496  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

suddenly  all  that  distance  nearer  than  his  Chili- 
cojote,  Mexico.  I  noticed  that  it  was  a  very  thin 
letter.  A  thousand  conjectures  rushed  upon  me, 
not  one  of  them  with  any  relativity  to  what  I  would 
find,  for  when  I  tore  it  open  there  floated  out  a 
printed  slip.  It  was  a  clipping  from  a  Pasadena 
newspaper  and  announced  his  engagement  to  Edith 
Stanley. 


CHAPTER  IX 

OF  such  stuff  as  this  our  lives  are  made  who  serve 
you  with  the  bread  of  heaven.  .  .  . 

I  have  taken  this  chapter  back  from  the  publishers 
to  say  anew  what  I  think  you  missed  in  the  first  writ 
ing,  that  such  as  it  is,  written  in  the  terms  of  life  as  you 
value  it,  the  materials  of  my  story  are  no  meaner  than 
go  to  make  up  more  illustrious  figures. 

I  could  have  made  it  seem  finer  to  you,  infinitely 
finer  as  it  actually  was  in  terms  of  my  valuation, 
by  glozing  all  the  facts  with  the  color  of  achieve 
ment,  the  glamour  of  great  names,  anecdote  and  inci 
dent.  Autobiographies  have  been  written  like  that, 
warmed  from  within  by  great  personalities  who  leave 
you  thrilled  and  agape  at  people  who,  judged  as  you 
feel  obliged  to  judge  your  nearest  neighbours,  fyou 
wouldn't  sit  down  with  at  table.  If  I  dare  to  dispense 
with  all  this,  offer  you  the  empty  cup,  plain  ware  at 
best,  chipped  at  the  edges,  it  is  because  I  know  it  is 
good  for  you  to  suffer  a  little  of  the  offence  which  we 
who  drink  of  it  endure  at  every  draught.  We,  here 
in  America. 

Over  there  in  Europe  where  there  is  a  kind  of  hered 
itary  life  of  the  stage,  though  their  women  haven't 
suffered  less  from  the  slights,  betrayals  and  self-seek- 

497 


498  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

ing  of  the  sort  of  men  who  seem  most  attracted  to 
gifted  women,  they  have  got  more  out  of  it.  Un 
touched  by  the  obsessions  of  Taylorville,  they  have 
been  able  to  live  life  for  its  own  sake,  but  we  ... 

There  was  no  reason,  of  course,  why  Helmeth 
Garrett's  marriage  should  have  come  to  me  with 
such  a  shock  of  wounding  and  affront.  Considering 
what  I  saw  always  about  me,  it  was  inexcusably  young 
and  gauche  of  me  to  have  imagined  that  mine  should 
turn  out  the  exceptional  case.  But  the  truth  was  that 
I  had  never  thought  of  mine  as  being  a  "case."  I  had 
avoided  public  marriage  because  I  was  still,  in  the 
light  of  my  bringing  up,  thinking  of  marriage  as  a 
way  of  living.  Marriage  in  my  experience  was  a  ring 
drawn  around  a  man's  life  by  the  radius  of  his  natural 
limitations.  On  marrying  him  you  went  inside  and 
stayed  there,  forswearing  all  limitations  of  your 
own.  I  do  not  think  it  ever  occurred  to  me,  that  in 
remaining  outside  that  circle  I  had  in  any  way  af 
fected  the  quality  of  Helmeth's  passion  for  me  or  its 
permanence. 

It  had  been  a  mistake  due  to  my  inexperience,  to 
suppose  that  the  Taylorville  pattern  of  life  was  the 
only  acceptable  one,  a  mistake  that  pricked  by  that 
sharp  hour  with  Pauline  Mills  had  shrunk  to  its  due 
proportion.  People  should  just  marry  on  the  strength 
of  their  mutual  recognition  of  mating  fitness,  and 
settle  how  they  will  live  afterward  in  the  light  of  that 
divine  certainty.  I  had  been  on  my  way  to  tell  him 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  499 

that.  I  was  to  tell  him  that  I  had  discovered  the  stage 
to  be,  rightly  served,  a  noble  calling  for  women,  and 
that  I  would  much  rather  have  our  daughters  grow 
up  into  women  like  Sarah  Croyden  even  at  the  cost 
of  Sarah's  experience,  than  to  make  Pauline  Millses 
of  them.  ...  It  was  one  of  the  stage  tricks  of  life 
that  I  should  have  been  shaping  the  very  words  in 
my  mind  when  the  news  of  his  engagement  reached 
me. 

I  held  myself  together  until  I  had  written  that  I 
understood  what  he  had  done,  and  that  I  hoped 
he  would  be  happy.  It  was  not  written  to  invite 
an  answer;  accordingly  none  came,  though  it  was  a 
long  time  before  I  gave  over  the  unconscious  start  at 
the  mere  sight  of  letters,  the  hope  that  somehow, 
against  all  reason  .  .  .  sometimes  even  now  .  .  . 

For  I  suffered  incredibly.  I  had  given  all  I  had  .  .  . 
and  all  at  once,  without  my  knowledge  or  consent  he 
had  dropped  me  into  the  class  of  women  who  may 
be  taken  or  dropped  for  the  mere  liking  or  misliking. 
He  wouldn't  have  taken  a  newspaper  from  a  street 
stand  and  not  left  the  customary  penny.  But  he  had 
taken  me  .  .  .  and  my  price  had  been  great  love 
and  lasting.  How  often  we  had  said  that  to  one  an 
other  .  .  .  such  love  as  ours  .  .  .  such  love  as  ours! 

There  was  nothing  anybody  could  do  for  me.  Sarah 
was  completely  taken  up  with  the  care  of  her  husband 
who  died  that  year,  Effie  was  expecting  another  baby. 
And  even  if  they  had  known*  there  was  nothing  they 


500  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

could  have  done.  Forbidden  from  the  very  recollec 
tion  of  our  passion  in  Italy  by  his  repudiation  of  its 
eternal  quality,  beaten  back  from  the  future  by  an 
other  woman's  possession  of  him,  my  heart  pacing  its 
narrow  round  never  attained  again  to  its  free  stride. 
For  a  long  time  I  could  not  endure  the  sound  of  great 
music  or  the  sharp  sudden  beauty  of  the  Spring.  It 
must  have  been  years  before  any  man  looked  at  me 
as  Helmeth  Garrett  must  have  done,  for  the  spark 
that  would  have  drawn  that  glance  was  dead  in  me. 
The  appalling  nature  of  his  desertion  had  left  me 
nothing  but  to  be  faithful. 

That  I  was  still  able  to  go  on  loving  him  was  per 
haps  the  reason  why  the  shock  left  no  public  adver 
tisement  on  my  career.  It  is  only  men  who  find  it 
important  to  their  business  to  be  loved.  With  women 
it  is  loving  which  is  the  fructifying  act. 

If  I  had  married  Helmeth  Garrett  I  might  have 
grown  used  to  him.  As  it  was  I  seemed  to  be  fixed, 
though  by  pain,  in  the  fruitful  relation.  Power  came 
at  last  and  occupied  the  scarred,  empty  places  where 
he  had  been.  I  gathered  up  and  wrought  into  the 
structure  of  my  art  the  pain  of  loving  as  well  as  its 
delight.  I  am  a  successful  actress.  Whatever  else  has 
happened  to  me,  I  am  at  least  a  success. 

I  never  saw  him  again.  I  never  saw  Henry  and 
Pauline  Mills  but  once,  and  some  bitterness  in  the 
occasion,  came  near  to  driving  me  toward  that  pit 
into  which  Pauline  was  willing  to  believe  I  had  al- 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  501 

ready  descended.  It  was  the  second  season  after 
I  had  parted  from  her  in  Chicago,  that  some  sort 
of  brokers'  convention  had  brought  Henry  on  to 
New  York  and  Pauline  with  him,  and  to  the  same 
hotel  where  Mark  Eversley  was  shut  up  with  an 
attack  of  bronchitis.  Jerry  and  I,  going  up  to  call 
on  him,  came  face  to  face  with  them. 

They  were  walking  in  the  lobby.  Pauline  was  in 
what  for  her,  was  evening  dress,  her  manner  a  little 
daunted,  not  quite  carrying  it  off  with  the  air  of  being 
established  at  the  pivot  of  existence  which  she  could 
manage  so  well  at  Evanston.  They  were  walking  up 
and  down,  waiting,  it  seemed,  for  friends  to  join  them, 
and  they  wheeled  under  the  great  chandelier  just  in 
time  to  come  squarely  across  us.  I  could  see  Pauline 
clutch  at  her  husband's  arm,  and  the  catch  in  her 
breath  with  which  she  jerked  herself  back  from  the 
impulse  to  nod,  and  looked  deliberately  away  from 
me.  For  her,  the  evidence  of  my  misdoing  hung  about 
me  like  an  exhalation.  She  was  afraid  I  should  insist 
on  speaking  to  her  and  some  of  her  friends  would 
come  up  and  see  me  doing  it.  I  didn't,  however, 
offer  to  speak  to  her,  I  looked  instead  at  Henry.  I 
stood  still  in  my  tracks  and  looked  at  him  steadily  and 
curiously.  I  wished  very  much  to  know  what  he 
meant  to  do  about  it.  He  turned  slowly  as  I  looked, 
from  deep  red  to  mottled  purple,  and  very  much 
against  his  will  his  head  bowed  to  me;  his  body,  to 
which  Pauline  clung,  dared  not  move  lest  she  detect 


502  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

it,  but  quite  above  and  independent  of  his  smooth- 
vested,  self-indulgent  front,  his  head  bowed  to  me. 
So  went  out  of  my  life  thirty  years  of  intimacy  which 
never  succeeded  in  being  intimate. 

But  though  one  may  excise  thirty  years  of  one's 
past  without  a  tremor,  one  may  not  do  it  without 
a  scar.  To  allay  the  irritation  of  Pauline's  slight,  I 
came  near  to  being  as  abandoned  as  she  believed,  as 
I  had  moments  of  believing  myself.  For  the  possibil 
ity  that  Helmeth  Garrett  had  found  in  our  relation  of 
setting  it  aside,  made  it  at  times  of  a  cheapness  which 
seemed  to  extend  to  me  who  had  entertained  it.  I 
should  have  been  happier,  I  thought,  to  have  taken 
it  lightly  as  he  did.  If  so  many  women  who  had  begun 
as  I  had  begun,  had  gone  on  repeating  the  particular 
instance,  wasn't  it  because  they  found  that  that  was 
the  easiest,  the  only  possible  way  to  bear  it?  How 
else  could  one  ease  the  pain  of  loving  except  by  being 
loved  again?  And  if  I  was  to  lose  the  Pauline  Millses 
of  the  world  by  what  had  been  entered  upon  so  sin 
cerely,  why,  then,  what  more  had  I  to  risk  on  the  light 
adventure?  All  this  time  I  was  sick  with  the  need  of 
being  confirmed  in  my  faith  in  myself  as  a  person 
worthy  to  be  loved,  to  feel  sure  that  since  my  love  had 
missed  its  mark,  it  wasn't  I  at  least  that  had  fallen 
short  of  it. 

It  was  that  summer  Jerry  had  been  driven  by  some 
such  need  I  imagined,  as  I  admitted  in  myself,  to 
put  his  future  in  jeopardy  by  another  marriage  which 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  503 

on  the  face  of  it,  offered  even  a  more  immediate  oc 
casion  for  shipwreck  than  the  first,  and  I  hadn't 
scrupled  to  put  forth  to  save  him,  the  new  capacity 
to  charm  which  had  come  upon  me  with  the  experi 
ence  of  not  caring  any  more  myself  to  be  charmed. 
I  knew;  it  would  have  been  a  poor  tribute  to  my  skill 
as  an  actress  if  I  hadn't  by  this  time  known  the 
moves  by  which  a  man  who  is  susceptible  of  being 
played  upon  at  all  can  be  drawn  into  a  personal  inter 
est.  Though  I  didn't  then,  and  do  not  now  believe 
that  a  love  serviceable  for  the  uses  of  living  together, 
can  be  built  up  out  of  "made"  love,  I  was  willing  for 
the  time  to  pit  myself  against  the  game  that  was 
played  by  Miss  Chichester  for  Jerry's  peace  of  mind. 
I  played  it  all  the  better  for  not  being,  as  the  young 
lady  was,  personally  involved  in  the  stake.  That  I 
thought  afterward  of  doing  anything  for  myself  with 
what  I  had  got,  when  at  last  I  had  by  this  means 
brought  Jerry  down  from  Newport  to  my  place  on  the 
Hudson  for  a  week  end,  was  in  part  due  to  the  extra 
ordinary  charm  that  Jerry  displayed  under  the  stimu 
lus  of  a  male  interest  in  me,  of  whom  for  years  he  had 
thought  of  as  being  quite  outside  such  consideration. 
There  was  a  kind  of  wistfulness  about  Jerry  when  he 
was  a  little  in  love,  that  made  him  irresistible;  no 
doubt  I  was  also  a  little  warmed  by  the  fire  which  I 
had  blown  up. 

He  was  to  come  from  Saturday  to  Monday,  and 
the  moment  I  saw  him  getting  down  from  the  dog- 


504  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

cart  I  had  sent  to  the  station  for  him,  I  knew  that 
I  had  only  to  let  that  interest  take  its  course,  to  find 
myself  provided  with  a  lover,  whether  or  no  I  could 
command  my  heart  to  loving.  I  do  not  remember 
that  I  came  to  any  conscious  decision  about  it,  but  I 
know  that  I  yielded  myself  to  the  growing  sense  of 
intimacy,  that  I  consciously  drew,  as  one  draws  per 
fume  from  a  flower,  all  that  came  to  me  from  him: 
his  new  loverliness,  touched  still  with  the  old  solicitous 
sense  of  the  preciousness  of  my  gift.  I  dramatized  to 
the  full  the  possibility  of  what  hung  in  the  air  between 
us,  I  dressed  myself,  I  set  the  stage  accordingly. 

It  was  Saturday  evening  after  dinner  that  I  sent 
him  to  the  garden  to  smoke,  keeping  the  house  long 
enough  to  fix  his  attention  on  my  joining  him,  by 
wondering  what  kept  me,  and  so  overdid  my  part  by 
just  so  much  as  I  made  myself  conscious  of  the  taint 
of  theatricality.  For  as  I  went  down  the  veranda 
steps  to  meet  him  in  the  rose  walk,  the  response  of 
the  actress  in  me  to  the  perf  ectness  of  the  setting  and 
my  fitness  for  the  part  of  the  great  lady  of  romance, 
drew  up  out  of  my  past  a  faint  reminder  of  myself 
going  up  another  pair  of  stairs  so  many  years  ago 
in  the  figure  of  an  orphan  child  toiling  through  the 
world.  Out  of  that  memory  there  distilled  presently 
a  cold  dew  over  all  my  purpose. 

It  was  a  perfect  night,  warm  emanations  from  the 
earth  shut  in  the  smell  of  the  garden,  and  light  airs 
from  the  river  stirred  the  full-leafed  trees.  At  the 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  505 

bottom  of  the  lawn  the  soft,  full  rush  of  the  Hudson 
made  a  stir  like  the  hurrying  pulse.  Beyond  the  silver 
gleam  of  its  waters,  lay  the  farther  bank  strewn  with 
primrose-coloured  lights,  and  above  that  the  moon, 
low  and  full-orbed  and  golden.  Its  diffusing  light 
mixed  and  mingled  with  the  shadow  of  the  moving 
boughs.  I  was  wearing  about  my  shoulders  a  light 
scarf  that  from  time  to  time  blew  out  with  the  wind, 
and  as  we  paced  in  the  garden  strayed  across  Jerry's 
breast  and  was  caught  back  by  me,  but  not  before  on 
its  communicating  thread,  ran  an  electric  spark.  It 
must  have  been  a  good  two  hours  after  moonrise  be 
fore  we  turned  to  go  in,  where  the  great  hall  lamp 
burned  with  a  steady  rose-red  glow. 

At  the  foot  of  the  veranda  a  breeze  sprang  up 
fresher  than  before,  that  caught  my  scarf  from  me 
and  wrapped  us  both  in  it  as  in  a  warm,  suffusing 
mood.  We  were  so  close  that  I  had  instinctively  to 
put  up  my  hand  as  a  barricade  against  what  was 
about  to  come  from  him  to  me,  and  as  I  did  so  I  was 
aware  of  something  that  rose  up  from  some  subter 
ranean  crypt  in  me  .  .  .  that  old  romance  of  my  mo 
ther's  .  .  .  women  like  her,  worlds  of  patient,  over 
working  women  who  could  do  without  happiness  if 
only  they  found  themselves  doing  right.  Somehow 
they  had  laid  on  me  the  necessity  of  being  true  to  the 
best  I  had  known,  because  it  was  the  best  and  had 
been  founded  in  integrity  and  stayed  on  renunciations. 
I  knew  what  I  had  come  into  the  garden  to  do.  I  had 


506  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

planned  for  it.  I  thought  myself  prepared  to  take  up, 
as  many  women  of  my  profession  did,  the  next  best 
in  place  of  the  best  which  life  had  denied  me,  but  my 
past  was  too  strong  for  me.  The  unslumbering  in 
stinct  that  saves  wild  creatures  before  they  are  well 
awake,  had  whipped  me  out  of  the  soft  entanglement, 
and  before  Jerry  could  grasp  the  change  of  mood  in 
me,  I  was  halfway  up  the  stair. 

"This  wind,"  I  said,  "I  think  it  will  blow  up  a  rain 
before  morning."  I  went  on  up  before  him.  "You 
can  see  the  river  darkling  below  its  surface,  it  does 
that  before  a  change."  I  went  on  drawing  the  chairs 
back  from  the  edge  of  the  veranda,  I  called  Elsa  to 
fasten  all  the  windows.  When  at  last  we  came  into  the 
glow  of  the  hall  lamp,  I  could  see  his  face  white  yet 
with  what  he  had  missed;  he  thought  he  had  blun 
dered.  He  caught  at  my  hand  as  I  gave  him  his  bed 
room  candle  in  an  effort  to  recapture  what  had  just 
trembled  in  the  air  between  us. 

"Olivia!  I  say  ...  Olivia!" 

"Your  train  leaves  at  nine-thirty,"  I  reminded  him. 
"I'll  be  up  to  pour  your  coffee." 

I  went  into  my  room  and  blew  out  my  candle.  The 
warm  summer  air  came  in  between  the  white  cur 
tains.  I  knelt  down  beside  my  bed ;  an  old  habit,  long 
discontinued.  I  was  too  much  moved  to  pray,  but  I 
continued  to  kneel  there  a  long  time  listening  to  the 
soft  shouldering  of  the  maples  against  the  wall  out 
side  the  window.  Far  within  me  there  was  something 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  507 

which  inarticulately  knew  that  whatever  the  world 
might  think  of  me,  in  spite  of  what  I  had  confessed  to 
Pauline,  I  was  a  good  woman;  I  had  loved  Helmeth 
Garrett  with  the  kind  of  love  by  which  the  world  is 
saved.  Past  all  loss  and  forsaking,  past  loneliness  and 
longing,  there  was  something  which  had  stirred  in  me 
which  would  never  waken  to  a  lighter  occasion;  and 
whether  great  love  like  that  is  the  best  thing  that  can 
happen  to  us  or  the  most  unusual,  it  had  placed  me 
forever  beyond  the  reach  of  futility  and  cheapness. 

It  was  the  last  thing  that  ever  happened  to  me  that 
had  power  through  my  life  to  affect  my  art.  Since 
that  my  life  has  been  shaped  wholly  to  my  art.  I  am 
not  sure,  indeed,  that  being  so  isolated  as  a  woman, 
has  not  been  of  advantage  to  the  actress.  A  year  or 
two  ago  when  I  had  to  stand  by  and  see  the  most 
consummate  genius  of  the  American  stage  done  out  of 
a  part  that  was  expressly  written  for  her,  by  her  own 
husband  in  the  interest  of  the  young  shallow  star 
who  had  caught  his  unstable  fancy,  I  thought  that 
there  might  be  worse  things  than  being  the  shell  of 
a  woman.  It  is  a  shorter  anguish  to  have  love  leave 
you  at  one  unreturning  flight. 

I  have  my  compensations.  I  am  a  power  in  my 
world  and  still  at  the  high  tide,  though  Forester, 
who  is  two  years  older  than  I,  is  admittedly  past  his 
prime,  and  Effie  at  my  age  will  be  grandmotherly. 
I  know  and  am  known  of  the  best  and  see  the  fruit 
of  my  labours  ripen  under  my  hand.  Jerry  and  I  are 


508  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

the  best  of  friends,  and  I  am  far  too  busy  a  woman 
to  miss  out  of  my  life  anything  Pauline  Mills  could 
have  contributed  to  it.  Besides,  I  am  very  much 
taken  up  with  my  nieces  and  nephews.  Forester's 
oldest  boy  shows  a  creditable  talent  for  the  stage, 
and  I  have  him  at  school  here  where  I  can  watch  him. 
I  shall  try  him  out  on  the  road  next  summer.  Effie's 
husband  is  in  the  legislature  now,  and  Effie  looks  to 
see  him  governor.  I  am  very  fond  of  my  sister;  we 
grow  together.  I  owe  it  to  her  to  have  found  ways  of 
making  things  easier  for  women  who  must  tread  my 
path  of  work  and  loneliness.  It  is  partly  at  her  sug 
gestion  that  I  have  written  this  book,  for  Effie  is  very 
much  of  the  opinion  that  the  world  would  like  to  go 
right  if  somebody  would  only  show  it  how.  Sarah 
also  added  her  word. 

"It  is  the  fact  of  your  telling,  whether  they  be 
lieve  you  or  not,  of  your  not  being  ashamed  to  tell, 
that  is  going  to  help  them,"  she  insists.  "At  any  rate 
it  will  help  other  women  to  speak  out  what  they 
think,  unashamed.  Most  women  are  not  thinking  at 
all  what  they  are  very  willing  to  be  thought  of  as 
thinking." 

I  am  the  more  disposed  to  take  their  word  for  it, 
since  as  they  are  both  happy,  they  cannot  be  sup 
posed  to  have  the  fillip  of  discontent.  Sarah  left  the 
stage  a  year  after  Mr.  Lawrence's  death,  to  marry  a 
banker  from  Troy,  and  she  has  never  regretted  it. 
She  calls  her  oldest  girl  Olivia.  It  is  the  sane  and 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  509 

sympathetic  contact  with  the  common  destiny,  which 
I  get  at  her  house  and  my  sister's,  that  keeps  me  from 
the  resort  of  successive  and  inconsequent  passions, 
such  as  fill  the  void  in  the  lives  of  too  many  women 
who  are  under  the  necessity  of  producing  daily  the 
materials  of  fire.  But  you  must  not  understand  me 
to  blame  women  for  taking  that  path  when  so  many 
are  closed  to  them.  Haven't  they  been  told  im- 
memorially  that  loving  is  their  proper  function,  their 
only  one? 

Last  year  I  walked  in  a  suffrage  parade  because 
Effie  wrote  me  that  it  was  my  duty,  and  the  swing 
of  it,  the  banners  flying,  the  proud  music,  set  gates 
wide  for  me  on  fields  of  new,  inspiring  experience  .  .  . 
all  the  paths  that  lead  to  the  Shining  Destiny  .  .  . 
why  shouldn't  women  walk  in  them?  I  should  think 
some  of  them  might  lead  less  frequently  to  bramble 
and  morass. 

"And  after  all,"  said  Jerry,  a  day  or  two  ago  when 
I  had  read  him  some  pages  of  my  book,  "you  have 
only  told  your  own  story,  you  haven't  found  out  why 
all  the  rest  of  us  run  so  afoul  of  personal  disaster. 
We,  I  mean,  who,  as  you  say,  nourish  the  world 
toward  the  larger  expectation." 

"And  after  all,"  said  I,  "what  is  an  artist  but  a 
specialist  in  human  experience,  and  how  can  we  find 
out  how  the  world  is  made  except  by  falling  afoul 
of  it?" 


510  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"If  when  we  fall  we  didn't  pull  the  others  down 
with  us!  I'm  willing  to  learn,  but  why  should  others 
have  to  pay  so  heavily  for  my  schooling?  Where's  the 
justice  in  making  us  so  that  we  can't  do  without  lov 
ing  and  then  not  let  us  be  happy  in  it?" 

"I  don't  believe  it  is  the  loving  that  is  wrong; 
it  is  the  other  things  that  are  tied  up  with  it  and 
taken  for  granted  must  go  with  loving,  that  we  can't 
get  on  with." 

"Marriage,  you  mean?" 

"Not  exactly  .  .  .  living  in  one  place  and  by  a  par 
ticular  pattern  .  .  .  thinking  that  because  you  are 
married  you  have  to  leave  off  this  and  take  up  that 
which  you  wouldn't  think  of  doing  for  any  other 


reason." 


"You  mean  ...  I  know,"  he  nodded;  "my  wife 
was  always  wanting  me  to  do  this  and  that,  on  the 
ground  that  it  was  what  married  people  ought,  and 
I  could  n't  see  where  it  led  or  why  it  was  important. 
But  what  if  it  should  turn  out  that  the  others  are 
wrong  and  we  are  right  about  it?" 

"Oh,  I  think  we  are  all  wrong.  People  like  us  are 
after  the  truth  of  life,  and  marriage  is  the  one  thing 
that  society  won't  take  the  trouble  to  learn  the  truth 
about.  My  baby,  you  know,  I  lost  him  because  I 
didn't  know  how  to  take  care  of  him,  and  there  was 
nobody  at  hand  who  knew  much  more  than  I.  But 
Effie's  last  baby  came  before  its  time  and  they  saved 
it  by  science,  by  knowing  what  and  how.  Why  can't 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  511 

there  be  a  right  way  like  that  about  marriage,  and 
somebody  to  discover  it?' 

"Then  where  would  we  come  in  —  after  it  was  all 
found  out  —  if  we  are  the  experimenters?" 

"Oh,  there 'd  be  other  fields.  Why  shouldn't  it  be 
that  when  we  have  found  out  our  relation  to  the  phys 
ical  world  —  we  are  finding  it,  you  know,  radioactivity 
and  laws  of  falling  bodies  —  go  on  finding  out  the  law 
of  our  relations  to  one  another?  And,  when  we've 
found  that  out,  then  there's  all  the  Heavenly  Host. 
We'd  have  to  find  out  how  to  get  on  with  Them." 

"And  in  the  meantime  we  are  spoiling  a  lot  of 
people's  lives  because  we  can't  get  on  with  one  an 
other "  He  broke  off  suddenly.  "My  wife  is 

married  again.  I  don't  know  if  I  told  you." 

"Ah,  then,  you  haven't  quite  spoiled  her  life;  she 
has  another  chance.  And  the  children?  "  He  had  been 
very  fond  of  them,  I  knew. 

"I  haven't  done  so  much  with  my  own  life  that 
I'd  insist  on  controlling  theirs." 

"You've  done  wonders,"  I  assured  him.  "Jerry, 
honest,  do  you  mind  it  so  much,  not  having  a  wife 
and  family?" 

"Oh,  Lord,  yes,  Olivia;  I  need  a  wife  the  same  as 
a  man  needs  a  watch,  to  keep  the  time  of  life  for  me." 
He  faced  me  with  a  swift,  sharp  scrutiny.  "Honest, 
do  you  mind?" 

"Sometimes,"  I  admitted,  "when  I  think  of  what's 
coming  .  .  .  when  I  can't  act  any  more." 


512  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"You'll  be  leading  them  all  still  when  you  are 
seventy.  You  do  better  every  season."  He  threw 
away  his  cigar  and  came  and  stood  before  me,  preen 
ing  his  raven's  wing  which  now  had  a  little  streak  of 
white  in  it.  "Olivia,  what's  the  matter  with  you  and 
me  being  married?  We  get  on  like  everything." 

"There's  more  to  it  than  that,  Jerry." 

"Being  in  love,  you  mean?  Well,  I  don't  know 
that  I  would  stick  at  a  little  thing  like  that."  He 
was  looking  down  at  me  with  an  effect  of  humour 
which  I  was  glad  to  see  covered  a  real  anxiety  about 
my  answer.  "I've  been  in  love  lots  of  times;  I've 
been  mad  about  several  women.  I  don't  feel  that  way 
about  you,  and  I  don't  know  that  I  care  to.  But  if 
wanting  you  is  loving,  if  worrying  about  you  when 
you  aren't  quite  up  to  yourself,  and  being  proud  of 
you  when  you  are,  if  liking  to  be  with  you  and  want 
ing  to  read  my  manuscripts  to  you  the  minute  I've 
written  them,  if  owing  you  more  than  I  owe  any 
other  woman  and  being  glad  to  owe  it,  is  loving  you, 
why,  I  guess  I  love  you  enough  for  all  practical  pur 
poses." 

"What  would  Tottie  Lockwood  say  —  or  is  it 
Dottie?"  Miss  Lockwood  was  Jerry's  latest  interest 
at  the  Winter  Garden. 

"Oh,  she  ?  She  isn't  in  a  position  to  say  anything. 
It's  only  vanity  on  her  part  and  the  lack  of  anything 
to  do  on  mine.  There'd  be  no  time  for  Totties  if  you 
married  me." 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  513 

"Jerry  .  .  .  since  you've  asked  me  ...  I  suppose 
you  know  that  I  ...  that  I  ..."  He  put  up  an  ar 
resting  hand. 

"I've  guessed.  There  isn't  anything  you  need  to 
tell  me.  And  I  haven't  an  altogether  clean  record 
myself.  But,  I  want  you  to  know,  Olivia,  that  there 
was  never  anything  in  my  case  that  you  could  take  ex 
ception  to,  so  long  as  my  wife  was  with  me.  I  couldn't 
make  her  believe  it,  but  it's  true.  Except,  of  course, 
that  I  was  a  fool.  I  hope  I'm  done  with  that." 

"I'd  want  you  to  be  a  bit  foolish  about  me,  Jerry, 
—  that  is,  if  I  make  up  my  mind  to  it."  I  had  to 
defend  myself  against  the  encouragement  he  got 
out  of  my  admission.  "But,  Jerry,  when  did  you 
begin  to  think  about  —  what  you've  just  said?" 

"About  marrying  you?  Ever  since  that  time  I 
went  down  to  your  place  .  .  .  when  that  Chich- 
ester  girl  .  .  .  ." 

"When  I  wouldn't  take  her  place,  .  •  , 
Well,  suppose  I  had;  suppose  I  had  been  .  .  . 
what  the  Chichester  girl  wouldn't  .  .  .  would 
you  still  have  wanted  to  marry  me?"  I  would 
not  admit  to  myself  why  I  had  asked  that  ques 
tion. 

"I  don't  know,  Olivia  .  .  .  men  don't,  you 
know,  not  often  .  .  .  but  I  want  to  marry  you 
now.  I  want  it  greatly."  I  held  him  off  still,  trying 
to  get  my  own  experience  in  shape  where  I  could 
leave  it  behind  me. 


514  A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS 

"Such  affairs  never  turn  out  well,  do  they?" 

"Hardly  ever,  I  believe." 

"Unless  you  turn  them  into  marriage,"  I  hazarded. 

"You  know,"  he  conjectured,  "I've  a  notion  that 
the  kind  of  loving  that  goes  to  making  such  affairs, 
can't  be  turned  into  marriage  very  easily.  It's  a  kind 
of  subconscious  knowledge  of  their  unfitness  that 
keeps  us  from  turning  them  into  marriage  in  the  first 
place." 

"I  wonder." 

He  let  me  be  for  the  moment  revolving  many  things 
in  my  mind. 

"It  wouldn't  be  the  vision  and  the  dream,  Jerry. 
You  and  I " 

"Well,  what  of  it?  It  might  be  something  better. 
Something  neither  of  us  ever  had,  really.  It  would 
be  company." 

"No,  I've  never  had  it."  I  remembered  how  blank 
the  issue  of  my  work  had  been  to  Helmeth  Garrett. 

"Well,  then,  ...  we  have  years  of  work  in  us  yet. 
I'll  buy  Polatkin  out  of  the  theatre."  He  was  going 
off  at  a  tangent  of  what  we  might  do  together,  but  I 
had  thought  of  something  more  pertinent. 

"We  might  solve  the  problem  of  how  to  keep  our 
art  and  still  be  happy." 

"We  might."  He  was  looking  down  on  me  with 
great  content,  but  quite  soberly.  "Tell  me,  Olivia, 
suppose  we  shouldn't,  even  with  the  unhappiness, 
with  all  you  have  been  through,  would  you  rather 


A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS  515 

be  what  you  are,  or  like  the  others?"  We  were  silent 
as  we  thought  back  across  the  years  together;  there 
was  very  little  by  this  time  that  we  did  not  know  of 
one  another. 

"No,"  I  said  at  last,  "if  being  different  meant 
being  like  the  others,  I'd  not  choose  to  have  it  any 
different." 


THE   END 


fctoetfibe 

CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U   .   S   .  A 


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